Dieter Appelt
Dieter Appelt ( born March 3, 1935 in Niemegk ) is a German photographer, painter, sculptor, video, action and object artist.
Life and work
Appelt studied from 1954 to 1958 music and singing at the State Academy of Music - Mendelssohn Academy in Leipzig and moved to the East Berlin German Academy of Music later. During his studies he devoted himself to the theory of composition by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Janáček. In 1959 he moved to West Berlin and studied until 1964 photography and experimental photography at the Academy of Arts at Heinz Hajek - Halke.
He completed his vocal studies in 1961 with diploma and went from there regularly as a singer in the choir of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. In the following years he worked in parallel as a photographer, painter and sculptor. A tour with the ensemble of the opera led him in 1970 to Japan, where he worked on the performance of Schoenberg 's opera Moses und Aron. Overall Appelt remained four months in Japan and attended alongside Tokyo and Osaka, Kyoto and Nara. In 1974 he had his first art exhibition at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where he remained until 1979 as a singer. It is only since that time he devoted himself exclusively to the visual arts.
If you stay on the northern Italian island of Monte Isola 1976 first photographs in which Appelt dealt with their own bodies emerged. To this end, he had limbs and head smeared with plaster and clay and wrapped with gauze bandages. From then on he concentrated on photographic work, which he has produced only in black and white with a plate camera. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, mostly stood in his actions and productions in front of the camera to be clothed or naked body at the center of the images, while repeatedly dealt with the issues of self-reflection, birth and death. Examples of his work this year are photographs, for which he built structures made of branches and positioned themselves within this construction for photography.
Various work trips led him in 1981 to France, Italy and Mexico. Other stays in Italy followed 1983-1987 and in the 1990s, when he also visited the United States and Canada. In 1982 he was appointed professor of film, video and photography at the University of the Arts Berlin. From 1996, he served as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts and later became vice president of the university. From the mid- 1980s Appelt turned to new techniques and his works have a markedly more abstract character since that time. For example, he took horizontally rotating objects repeated with the same film, so that a fictional sculptural object appeared in the photo. From 1988 to 1990, he curated the exhibition Between black and white for the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.
Outside Berlin Appelt was known nationwide only by his international success. In 1990 he received an invitation to the Venice Biennale for the first time. The Art Institute of Chicago dedicated to him in 1994 a major retrospective, which was subsequently shown also in Quebec, New York, New Orleans and Berlin. At the Venice Biennale in 1999, he was invited again, and he showed alongside photographs and installations and video work.
Dieter Appelt lives and works in Berlin. He is a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, Karl Hofer Society and was for a time its CEO. He also was a member of the Commission of Experts of the Museum of Photography in Berlin.
Works by Dieter Appelt, there are, among others in the Berlin Gallery, the National Gallery (Berlin), in The Walther Collection in Neu- Ulm, at Sinclair House in Bad Homburg and Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken. In other countries shows, for example, the Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge (Massachusetts ), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, the Musée National d' Art Moderne in Paris, the Musée d' Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, Musée de l' Elysée in Lausanne and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Art in Ghent his work.