Exhibition views
Going beyond the boundaries of painting, drawing and sculpture, Norbert Prangenberg (1949–2012) developed a closely interconnected and widely ramified oeuvre. It unites archaic symbolism and baroque colourfulness, geometric clarity and organic proliferation, sensuous luxuriance and sensitive spirituality.
“Some of my things are playful or have a love of flourish, spontaneity, a certain pleasure in form. But life does not become frivolous because you have fun now and then. On the contrary, it perhaps becomes deeper.”
Norbert Prangenberg, 2000
Norbert Prangenberg became internationally known through his participation in the documenta 7 in 1982. In 1993 the trained goldsmith took up a professorship of ceramics and glass-painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. The often life-sized hollow forms that Prangenberg made from then on in glazed clay, calling them Figures, are impressive characters of idiosyncratic beauty. They are at the centre of a homage to Prangenberg’s search for objects with charisma that adopts a leitmotif of his creativity as its title: ‘pleasure in form’.
The exhibition, realised in close collaboration with the estate of Norbert Prangenberg, will open on 23 June 2019, the 70th anniversary of the artist’s birth. With 70 ceramics, paintings and drawings, some of them in large formats, the presentation gives a rich insight into Prangenberg’s work cosmos of over thirty years.
Eupen Purple, 1994/98, watercolour, pastel and pigment on canvas, 181 x 220 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Karsten Greve, Köln © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019