Ludger Gerdes

Ludger Gerdes ( born April 10, 1954 in Lastrup, † October 17, 2008 at Dülmen ) was a German painter, sculptor and multimedia artist.

Life

After graduating from high school in Vechta Ludger Gerdes Antonianum studied from 1975 to 1982, first at the Academy of Fine Arts Münster bei Timm Ulrichs and Lothar Baumgarten and from 1977 at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf with Gerhard Richter.

With his critique of bond modern art on the museum and temporary exhibition Gerdes joined the early 1980s in exhibitions and promotions out - among other things together with Thomas Schütte. He pleaded for works of art as a means for the design of public space and as a medium of public communication. Especially the English landscape garden was him doing important historical precedent. He was regarded as the intellectual head of the artist - grouping " Düsseldorf modellers ".

In 1982 he was represented at the documenta 7 with an architecturally inspired triptych in Kassel. At this time was a series painters images with pronounced allegorical narrative elements and the Black Series, abstract paintings between monochrome and typeface. With his land art project A ship for Munster for the show Skulptur.Projekte 1987 he was known to a wider audience. In 1986, he received the ars viva prize of the Cultural Committee of German Economy in the Federal Association of German Industry, 1994 Sprengel Prize for Visual Arts, Hanover.

1990 to 1992 he taught at the Städel School in Frankfurt; 1998 to 2004 was professor of painting and multimedia at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe; since 2005 professor of painting at the Muthesius Academy of Kiel. In addition to his professorship lived and worked in Munich and Dusseldorf.

Ludger Gerdes worked double track in the fields of visual arts and philosophy: his large-format painting pursued questions of surface and image reality, his sculptures were the object quality of things, their degree of reality as well as their public function after. Especially with this ultimately political position of art, Gerdes employed not only as an artist but also very effective as a theoretical writer and lecturer. Among connoisseurs Gerdes was considered a " silent ", but important artists of his generation (1989 ) formulated a philosophical and aesthetic reflection of existence with its " visual metaphors " in public spaces, such as the neon sculpture ICHS in the garden of the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld.

In recent years, he devoted himself increasingly to public sculpture and the aesthetic confrontation with the public space, documented about 1996 in a series of photographs 140 square designs in Germany. A combined new group of conceptual diptychs literary and philosophical texts with photography. In Munich in 2003 arose with the design of the Walter Sedlmayr - square his last major public three-dimensional project.

Ludger Gerdes came on 17 October 2008 in a car accident. His estate is managed in future by the archive for artist discounts the Arts Fund in Pulheim near Cologne.

Works (selection)

533050
de