Rolf-Gunter service

Rolf-Gunter Dienst (born November 18, 1942 in Kiel ; † March 15, 2016 in Baden-Baden ) was a German painter , art critic , author and publicist .

Life

Rolf-Gunter Dienst grew up in Kiel. At the age of 18 he became co-editor of the magazine Rhinozeros . From 1960 to 1965 he and his brother Klaus-Peter published the avant-garde , experimental art and literature magazine in their own publishing house. The Dienst brothers worked with a typographic style that can be attributed to visual poetry . The texts were broken up into hard-to-read, handwritten individual pages before the magazine moved more towards conveying text in a casual typewriter style in the last few issues. The magazine has published extensive contemporary American literature, including texts by Henry Miller , Brion Gysin , William S. Burroughs, and many poets of the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance literary movement .

From 1965 to 1991 Dienst was editor of the magazine Das Artwork , which was published in Baden-Baden and was one of the "most important publication organs for modern and contemporary art history in West Germany".

At the same time, Dienst developed his own artistic style. Together with Bernd Berner , Klaus Jürgen-Fischer and Eduard Micus he was a member of the artist group SYN (1965–1970). After several national and international guest lectureships (New York 1966–68, Braunschweig 1969, Frankfurt / Main 1970, Sydney 1976–77, Stuttgart 1989–90), Rolf-Gunter Dienst held a professorship for painting at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1992 to 2008 Nuremberg .

He has received several awards and grants for his work. In 1968 he received the " Villa Romana " award, Florence; 1971–1972 a scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts , Paris; 1979 the Villa Massimo Prize, Rome and 1982 the Prize Artists in Baden-Baden of the Society of Friends of Young Art Baden-Baden . In 1990 he stayed in Japan at the invitation of the Japan Foundation . In 1991 he was awarded the Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany and in 2007, together with Silvia Bächli , was honored with the Hans Thoma Prize of the State of Baden-Württemberg.

Dienst lived with the architect Gunild Ober-Berg in Berlin and Kauffenheim (Alsace).

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The artistic work of Dienst, which can be classified as Concrete Art , consists of paintings and drawings.

A recurring element of his painting is a calligraphic symbol that he invented. It works like an abbreviation, but remains empty in terms of content. Its purpose is to be integrated into the painting process as a graphic emblem and to be strung together in varying forms of movement.

After early monochrome paintings, polychrome compositions dominated his work. Since 1996 they have been dominated by strictly subdivided, geometric fields. Literary works such as »Undr« by Jorge Luis Borges , Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel José García Márquez , the poems of Seamus Heaney or Herman Melville's Moby-Dick served as impulses and associative foil . In doing so, Dienst was not concerned with illustrating the texts, but with translating the moods they created into visual language. The painter used the principle of the series to experiment with different color constellations, while the basic compositional concept of the pictures remained the same.

In parallel, Dienst was drawing excessively. His drawings are made with pencil or watercolors. Early drawings, made in 1976 after a flight over the northern Australian bushland, were inspired by the landscape. Later Dienst increasingly broke away from real models and developed an autarkic oeuvre of drawings made up of small-scale structures with often bubble-shaped, graphic internal shapes.

As a painter and draftsman, Dienst was one of the defining European exponents of Concrete Art. At the same time, he was an influential art theorist from the 1960s to the 1980s, especially in Germany. He was a full member of the German Association of Artists and as such took part in a total of twenty annual DKB exhibitions between 1964 and 1990.

Exhibitions (selection)

• 2016: "My poem is called color", MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art, Duisburg
• 2016: "Luce", Wittenbrink Gallery, Munich

• 2015/16: "Rolf-Gunter Dienst - Early Pictures and Gouaches", Galerie Max Hetzler , Berlin; "Rolf-Gunter Dienst: Primavera", Diehl Gallery, Berlin. Catalog.

• 2012: Art Museum Bayreuth

• 2011: "Painting and Drawing", Galerieverein Leonberg e. V., Leonberg

• 2010: “Macondo and other beautiful pictures”, Wittenbrink Gallery, Munich

• 2007: “Moby Dick and others”, Wittenbrink Gallery, Munich

• 2006: Kunstmuseum Bonn

• 2005: Appel Gallery, Frankfurt / M.

• 2002: State Art Gallery Karlsruhe

• 2001: Schleswig-Holstein Art Association in the Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Bayreuth Art Museum

• 1998: Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal

• 1996: Appel and Fertsch Gallery, Frankfurt / M .; Gallery Karin Fesel, Düsseldorf

• 1993: Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig; Defet Gallery, Nuremberg

• 1992: Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund
• 1970: Rolf Gunter Dienst, Lauter Gallery , Mannheim [1]
• 1966: Syn: Bernd Berner , RG Dienst, Klaus Jürgen-Fischer , Eduard Micus , Marc Vaux, Galerie Margarete Lauter , Mannheim

Collections

• Kunsthalle Kiel
• Kunsthalle Mannheim
• Museum Morsbroich , Leverkusen
• Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern
• City Gallery Wolfsburg
• Wilhelm Hack Museum , Ludwigshafen
• Collection of contemporary art from the Federal Republic of Germany

Publications (selection)

Rhinoceros

• Klaus-Peter Dienst, Rolf-Gunter Dienst (Eds.): Rhinozeros , No. 1, Itzehoe 1960 - No. 10, Berlin 1965.
  • Rhinozeros , No. 5, Itzehoe 1961. Authors: David Ball, WS Burroughs, Gregory Corso , Robert Creeley , Ed Dorn, Larry Eigner, Theodore Enslin, Allen Ginsberg , Piero Hieliczer, Anselm Hollo , Michael Horovitz , Dell Hymes , Robert Kelly, Jack Kerouac , Michael McClure , David Meltzer, Peter Orlovsky, Marc D. Schleifer, Gary Snyder , Gael Turnbull, Philip Whalen.
  • Special: Jean Dubuffet , Rhinozeros , No. 8, Itzehoe 1963

Books

• Rolf-Gunter Dienst, Pop Art - critical information . Limes, Wiesbaden 1965.
• Rolf-Gunter Dienst, positions. Picturesque painting - plastic sculpture . DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1968.
• Rolf-Gunter Dienst, German Art, a New Generation . DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1970.
• Rolf-Gunter Dienst, Still Art . Droste, Düsseldorf 1970.
• Rolf-Gunter Dienst, Lindner . Hatje, Stuttgart 1970. Art Today , No. 13.
• Rolf-Gunter Dienst, KF Dahmen. The painterly work 1950 - 1972 . Publishing house GeraNova Bruckmann, Munich 1984.

Literature (selection)

• Rolf Wedewer, Rolf-Gunter Dienst. Pictures and leaves. City Museum Leverkusen Morsbroich Castle, Verlag H. Koopmann, 1978.
• Marisa Volpi and Helmut Heissenbüttel, Rolf-Gunter Dienst, Opere romane 1979-1981. Edizioni dell'Attico, Rome 1981.
• Stefan Gronert, Thomas Wagner, Rolf-Gunter Dienst: Paintings 1997 - 2001 . Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel 2001.
• Peter Hank , Rolf-Gunter Dienst. I'll just keep on: Selected drawings 1962 - 2012. modo Verlag, Freiburg 2012.
• Margrit Brehn (ed.), Rolf-Gunter Dienst. 50 years of painting . Texts by Margrit Brehm, Robert Kudielka, Dirk Teuber, Rüdiger Hurle. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2014.
• Wolfgang Heger, Lichtzeichen: 12 Talks - A portrait of the painter Rolf-Gunter Dienst in Dialog. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) 2015.
• Thomas Wagner : Don't be afraid of red, yellow and blue. (Obituary) In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 16, 2016, p. 12.

Web links

• Literature by and about Rolf-Gunter Dienst in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Rolf-Gunter Dienst [2]

Individual evidence

1. ↑ According to FAZ and Badisches Tagblatt, the place of death is Baden-Baden; Deviating from this, Berlin with Gottfried Knapp : On the death of the painter Rolf-Gunter Dienst , Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 16, 2016; accessed on March 17, 2016
2. ↑ Jed Birmingham: Rhinozeros Archive , RealityStudio. A William S. Burroughs Community (English).
3. ↑ Nikola Doll: Art history after 1945: Continuity and a new beginning in Germany . Böhlau Verlag, Cologne, Weimar 2006, p. 137 .
4. ↑ kuenstlerbund.de: Exhibitions since 1951 ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on March 16, 2016)