Henry Gowa

Henry Gowa ( born May 25, 1902 in Hamburg, † 23 May 1990 in Munich) was a German painter and stage designer.

Life

Gowa Gowa was born as Hermann in Hamburg. After studying in Munich, he gained a reputation as a stage designer and worked in Munich, Leipzig and Frankfurt. 1931 dedicated to him of progressive gallery owner Louis Schames an exhibition, where his images and set designs were first shown in a solo exhibition. With the coming to power of the Nazis Gowa emigrated to Paris and was interned in the course of hostilities. From revulsion at his namesake Hermann Goering, he joined his first name to Henry. Through his contacts with the Resistance Gowa could hide in a mountain village in southern France and escaped the Holocaust. After 1945 Gowa was first head of the School of Arts and Crafts in Saarbrücken, where he called Frans Masereel. Later he became director at the Art School in Offenbach am Main (now College of Design ), where he contributed significantly to the internationalization, including by several exhibitions such as " The boy painting in France" ( Offenbach, among others, 1955), " The young German painting" (Paris, 1955). Gowa was Commissioner-General of the German section of the Biennale. In 1959 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. He spent his life in Oberschleißheim, where his estate was incorporated from 1200 levels. This is now on permanent loan in the Ludwig Meidner Archive of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt.

Work

Gowa was only an admirer of Cézanne and was coined in exile by the protagonists of the avant-garde in France, whom he had met in person, such as Bonnard, Chagall, Matisse and Picasso. After the war he was looking increasingly looking for more universal forms of expression, abstract compositions it originated in the field of tension between explosive dynamics and balanced harmony.