Werner Zöhl

Werner Zöhl (* 17th November 1926 in Stendal , Province of Saxony , † 20 July 2012 in Fischerhude , Lower Saxony ) was a German painter of Expressionism .

Life

Werner Zöhl was born in Stendal in the Altmark in 1926. There he attended the Winckelmann Grammar School, where the painter and graphic artist Erwin Hahs was a teacher at the end of the war (from 1942) . The two painters were close friends until Hahs' death in March 1970. Hahs, himself an expressionist painter, inspired the young Zöhl for expressionism and encouraged him in his desire to become a painter. Zöhl, a soldier from 1944, was then taken prisoner by the English, from which he was not released until 1948. He then moved to Bremen and, in addition to his apprenticeship as a bricklayer, devoted himself intensively to painting. In 1951 he was awarded the “Young Art Lower Saxony” prize, and Zöhl also had the opportunity to attend art courses at home and abroad. His friendship with Hans Meyboden and Erhart Mitzlaff began at that time . In 1955 Zöhl married his partner Margarete. Three years later he had the opportunity to travel to the Soviet Union with a delegation of artists . In general, Zöhl loved to travel all his life and toured France, Poland, Greece, the USA, Tanzania, Andalusia, Italy, Hungary and Turkey. Zöhl was also a co-founder of the “New Forum” in Bremen. In 1964 the company moved to Quelkhorn near the artists' village Fischerhude (today incorporated) in the Surheide . There he was able to work in peace and to exchange ideas with the local painter friends.

In 1978 the ARD produced a television portrait with the title “Views of a People” about Zöhl. Werner Zöhl died on July 20, 2012 in his home in Fischerhude. In June 2016, the Zöhl Museum was opened in that location.

plant

Werner Zöhl's work was initially shaped by his early teacher Erwin Hahs, who, as a good friend of the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, had taken up the Bauhaus ideas and developed them further. Hahs himself formulated his painterly form as follows: “The form can neither be borrowed, nor is it dictated. It is a sum of considerations that result from the content, the material, the cause and purpose of the tasks and the nature of the creator. ”After the war-related interruption of his artistic work, Zöhl was mainly concerned with moving to Bremen with Paul Klee and Lionel Feininger . He then developed his typical style: Zöhl was characterized by geometric color surfaces that he assembled into landscapes or still lifes. With this style he was able to celebrate his first successes with exhibitions in Braunschweig, Münster, Bremen and Hamburg in the 1950s. He also drew portraits for the "Evangelical Literature Observer" and received public commissions for art in buildings . The experiences of his many trips, the moods and the cultural conditions of the respective countries always flowed into Zöhl's art. For example, during a summer vacation that the Zöhl family spent in southern France in 1971, a group of works with very light southern color impressions was created. Although the concrete representation is rarely found in Zöhl's work, he is not referred to as an abstract artist. Traugott Koch wrote in the book “Blumenwald und Vogelbaum” about the work of Werner Zöhl: “But in the fact that nature has meaning and coherence and is therefore not meaningless and mere material, Zöhl's pictures differ fundamentally from most of them Contemporaries! ... And so they do our eyes good. "

Werner Zöhl Museum

On the initiative of his wife and son, a museum and an archive of his pictures were opened in 2016. Zöhl left around 8,000 works, around half of them in the form of oil paintings.

literature

• Wolf-Dietmar Stock, Werner Wischnowski: Fischerhude. In the footsteps of the artists . Series Galerie Verlag, Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus, 1986, ISBN 978-3-88132-163-1 .
• Kunstverein Fischerhude in Buthmannshof e. V. (Ed.): Werner Zöhl - flower forest and bird tree . Publishing house Atelier im Bauernhaus, 2014, ISBN 978-3-88132-691-9 .
• Irmela Dening, Werner Zöhl (Ill.): On the way in twilight. Poems . Publishing house Atelier im Bauernhaus, 2005, ISBN 978-3-88132-279-9 .

documentary

• Views of a person , TV portrait of ARD , 1978

Web links

• Werner-Zöhl-Museum / Art on the River, Fischerhude