Reinhard Drenkhahn

Reinhard Drenkhahn (born February 9, 1926 in Hamburg ; † March 26, 1959 there ) was a German painter and graphic artist .

Life

Reinhard Drenkhahn was born the son of a shipbuilding engineer. After an apprenticeship as a decorator and upholsterer, he began studying interior design at the Hanseatic University of Fine Arts in Hamburg in 1943 . At the age of eighteen he was drafted into military service the following year and later interned in Switzerland. After the war he finished his studies, but finally found his real profession in painting. In 1947 and 1948 he studied with Karl Kaschak and Willem Grimm at the Landeskunstschule Hamburg, then until 1950 with Arnold Fiedler in the workshop group “ Der Baukreis ”. At that time, Drenkhahn was earning his living as a prop master at Hamburger Real-Film and as a port and harvest worker. In the summer of 1950 he moved into his own studio in Sierichstrasse 52 together with his partner, the painter Gisela Bührmann . The painter and sculptor Peter Fetthauer took over the studio in 1970 . The following year, Drenkhahn traveled to Paris for the first time, where he was greatly impressed by the painters of the École de Paris and the Informel . Further trips followed. In 1953 Drenkhahn destroyed most of his early works as a kind of liberation. At the end of 1956 he had his first solo exhibition in the Hamburger Kunsthalle , in 1958 he was awarded the Lichtwark Prize of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg. Orders from the Hamburg cultural authority for wall designs in public spaces and numerous exhibitions, including national and international ones, followed. But Drenkhahn put an abrupt end to his promising artistic career with his suicide in 1959. He left behind an impressive and rich oeuvre of over 500 paintings, drawings, prints and a few sculptures.

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Alongside Paul Wunderlich , Horst Janssen and KRH Sonderborg, Reinhard Drenkhahn was one of Hamburg's outstanding artistic personalities in the 1950s and was a pioneer of informal painting in Hamburg.

Drenkhahn's colorful, but lonely “urban landscapes” at the beginning of the 1950s still bear witness to the exploration of late expressionism. Depictions of the sand-lime brick factory in Kirchsteinbek near Hamburg as well as the landscapes of his first trips to Ischia and Ibiza convey his special feeling for the use of color. On the Elbe beach and in Niendorf on the Baltic Sea, Drenkhahn painted “Harbor Pictures” and “Beach Still Life”, in which his pictorial imagination is sparked by found objects such as windshields and old winches. Soon afterwards, surreal “sandpipers” populated his pictures. These threatening chimeras and emaciated wire men became for him an existentialist metaphor.

In 1957 and 1958 the series of works “Krebse” and “Ofensteine” were created, which in ever new variations show the exploration of material and surface, of color dynamics and pictorial space. The friendship with Horst Janssen and Paul Wunderlich allowed Drenkhahn to experiment with etching and lithography. Here, as in painting, the pictorial means became increasingly independent, but the object remained recognizable as the starting point and support of the design, despite the great abstraction.

The late “Ofenstein” and “Mauer” pictures show the influence of French art, by painters such as Dubuffet and Wols , but they are equally great and independent works of informal painting. Relief-like, encrusted and scratched surfaces, combined with a differentiated color of luminous vitality or dull threat, let the viewer feel the intensity of the artistic process.

Many of Drenkhahn's works are characterized by a rugged materiality and a gloomy mood that also determined the life of this introverted artist who experienced the war at a young age. Motifs such as barbed wire, bars, thorns and thistles keep appearing. The feeling of inner hurt culminated in Drenkhahn's later series of works, “Leitermann”. He worked on the subject in large-format painting, in etching, but also in small statuettes made of wire and nails. These crucifix-like representations were his profane and self-referential version of Ecce Homo .

A catalog raisonné of his paintings is in progress. The graphic work is published as volume 15 of the series Hamburger Künstlermonographien .

literature

• Reinhard Drenkhahn. (= Hamburg artist monographs , Volume 15.) Hamburg 1980.
• Erna Knoefel: Talking about art. Hamburg 1993.
• Ulrich Luckhardt: Reinhard Drenkhahn, Ofenstein, Krebs, Leitermann. Series of works 1957/1958. Hamburg 2000. (Catalog of an exhibition by the Hamburger Sparkasse)
• Dagmar Lott-Reschke: Reinhard Drenkhahn (1926–1959).
• Stefan Blessin : Horst Janssen. BS LILO Verlag, Hamburg 1984/1993.