Stefan Szczesny
| Stefan Szczesny | |
|---|---|
Stefan Szczesny 2008
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| Born |
Stefan Szczesny 9 April 1951 Munich, West Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Known for | Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Printmaking, Ceramics |
| Notable work | The Living Planet (2000) |
| Movement | Expressionism |
| Website | www |
Stefan Szczesny (born 9 April 1951) is a German painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. He is best known for co-founding the Neue Wilde movement in the early 1980s.
Stefan Szczesny was born in Munich as the son of the philosopher and publisher Gerhard Szczesny and his wife Martha Meuffel, a theatre producer. Upon attending primary and secondary schools in Munich, he acquired his first training as a painter at a private art school in Munich (1967–9). From 1969 to 1975, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. His mentor there was the abstract painter Günter Fruhtrunk. During this time, he also attended lectures in art history and philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University and worked as a freelance art critic.
Under the influence of his mentor Fruhtrunk Szczesny experimented in these years with abstract and minimalist art. A major turn-about occurred in 1975-76, when Szczesny was in Paris on a scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Service. The encounter there with the paintings of Delacroix caused Szczesny to rethink abstract and minimalist tenets and to return, eventually, to figuration.
The break was not immediate: in 1979, for instance, he exhibited relatively abstract paintings at the Kunstforum of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus; many of the works created during a stay at the Villa Romana in Florence in 1980, too, display abstract features. Nonetheless, it was as a figurative painter that Szczesny eventually gained wide public attention, in particular as the organiser of, and participant in, the 1981 exhibition Rundschau Deutschland. Rundschau Deutschland brought together works of a number of young German-speaking figurative painters who later came to be known as the Neue Wilde.
Szczesny was one of the protagonists of the Neue Wilde. In 1982, he participated in a number of "Neue Wilde"-related exhibitions, such as "5 aus Köln" ("5 from Cologne", with Walter Dahn, Jiri Dokoupil, Gerhard Kever and Andreas Schulze) and "Die neue Künstlergruppe Die wilde Malerei" ("The new group of painters: Wild painting"), both in Cologne. From 1984 to 1988, he edited the journal "Malerei. Peinture. Painting", which offered an important forum for the new figurative painters.
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