Heinz Koppel

Heinz Koppel ( born January 29, 1919 in Berlin, † December 1, 1980 in Llety Caws, Wales ) was a British painter of German origin.

Life

Koppel was born in Berlin to Jewish parents and spent his childhood there. After the seizure of power by the National Socialists, the family emigrated in 1933 to Prague. There the son began an artistic education. Together with the Father Joachim went coupler 1938 to Great Britain. Plagued by bouts of severe arthritis, the Mother Paula could not connect the two. She remained in Czechoslovakia. During the Holocaust, she was deported to Theresienstadt and finally murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp.

Joachim coupling operation near the Welsh Pontypridd a factory for zippers, while the son Heinz attended an art school in London. He studied under German immigrant Martin Bloch, who exercised a great influence on his future work. In addition, coupling began to be interested in psychoanalysis in the tradition of Sigmund Freud, which is also reflected in his art. Further influences were in German Expressionism and Surrealism.

From 1944, Koppel lived in South Wales Dowlais near Merthyr Tydfil, where he taught as an art teacher children and adults. The Welsh landscape became an important subject of his paintings. His work in this area show mystical influences and border on the fantastic. A further object of his work in this period were the decaying industrial areas in Wales and its people. The motif of the murdered mother has taken up in a series of papers coupling.

1956 left coupling Wales with his wife and their children. For a time he lived in London and Liverpool, where he continued working as an art teacher in each case. In this time switching began regularly exhibiting in galleries in London. Finally, he settled in a farmhouse in Cwmerfyn in the area of Aberystwyth near the Welsh coast. He was still active as an artist and experimented in later work with materials such as glass fiber and tree resin.

Heinz Koppel died suddenly in 1980 at the age of 61 years.

Position of his work

Many works of coupling found in museums and galleries in South Wales. In his home country he other hand, is largely unknown. From August 2009 to January 2010 an exhibition of his works was held for the first time on German soil. Under the title, Heinz Koppel. An artist between Berlin and Wales and of his work in the premises of - shown " New Synagogue Centrum Judaicum " in Berlin. The catalog for the exhibition was published by Berlin -Brandenburg. On the occasion of the exhibition opening Ingeborg Ruthe wrote in the Berliner Zeitung:

" Koppel art that is not an Avant -garde, it is that of a highly idiosyncratic and therefore has hardly perceived late Lings of modernity. In a few years he took for himself, as it were in manic- depressive amplitudes - the distinctive style of classical modernism after. He used mixed hesitation for his enigmatic, suggestive imagery, in which nothing is ever complacent or effective. "