Klaus Fußmann

About the artist

Klaus Fußmann is one of Germany's best-known contemporary painters. Since around 2000, the subjects of his oil paintings, watercolours, gouaches, pastels and prints have been primarily influenced by the landscape around Gelting in Schleswig-Holstein and the flowers in the garden he has planted there himself. Born in Velbert in the Rhineland in 1938, Fußmann first studied at the Folkwang School in Essen/Werden (1957-61), then at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin (1962-66), where he held a professorship for painting from 1974-2005. From the very beginning of his artistic career, Fußmann has been interested in analysing visible reality and its phenomena. This also concerns questions of human existence. Initially, the painter chose individual human figures, interiors of his studios, rooms of abandoned flats, still lifes in the form of tables with vessels, metropolitan "landscapes" (Wannseedeponie), views from the Berlin studio window and portraits as his subjects. For a long time, Fußmann preferred grey and brown tones for the summarily depicted subjects. Fußmann's works were recognised early on: in 1971/72 his works were shown in an exhibition at the National Gallery in Berlin, in 1972 he was awarded the Villa Romana Prize, in 1973 he had a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Darmstadt and in 1974 he was appointed professor of painting at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin. Fußmann's work was given new impetus by his stays in Schleswig-Holstein in 1972, where he has lived and worked in his own house in Gelting during the summer months since 1978. The Berlin themes are now joined by the landscape of Schleswig-Holstein, into which Fußmann partly integrates his portraits and mysterious, symbolic depictions of figures. In the 1980s and 1990s, the landscape paintings, which are based on motifs from Schleswig-Holstein, still show a mood predominantly determined by dark colour tones. Important retrospective exhibitions were dedicated to the artist's work in these years (e.g. 1980 Aachen, Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum; 1982 Darmstadt, Mathildenhöhe; 1987 Schleswig, Schloss Gottdorf). Towards the end of the 1980s, the application of colour in Fußmann's oil paintings became more impasto, increasingly gaining the sculptural power and abstraction that characterise his oil paintings to this day. In terms of colour, there was a change towards lighter colours determined by visible reality, initially in watercolour and pastel and at around the same time as he became interested in depicting flowers and blossoms (around 1985). The artist first thematised these in watercolour and gouache, then also in oil paintings.
From the beginning of the second millennium, the moving sea with its various shades of blue, the bright yellow rapeseed fields and vast wheat fields with farmsteads sporadically emerging from them, the colourful blooms of his flower garden form the central subjects of Fußmann's expressive, intensely coloured watercolours, gouaches, pastels and oil paintings. They all bear witness to the painter's deep connection with the natural environment of Schleswig-Holstein. When visualising it, Fußmann is particularly interested in the constant movement and changeability of nature, the ephemeral nature of its appearance: "My aim is to depict the accidental (...). The appearance only exists in this moment, then never again. I paint quickly, because only by working provisionally do I realise the fluidity of time." (1985) In the case of flowers, it is primarily the blossoms that attract him to depict them; in the landscape, it is the light of the north with its rapid changes. Klaus Fußmann works swiftly in order to be able to appropriately depict the fleeting. The colours are often mixed directly on the support rather than on the palette. This is particularly noticeable in the impasto oil paintings. In terms of colour, these are sometimes more restrained and abstract than the watercolours and gouaches, but no less expressive for that. Fußmann's pictures of the landscape and its phenomena are filled with an intense experience of nature and its changeable beauty, which is vividly communicated to the viewer in all its fullness.