Harald Duwe (1926-1984)
27th February to 16th April 2016
Opening: 26th February 2016, 6-9 p. m.
On the occasion of the 90th birthday of Harald Duwe the gallery of the Art Foundation Poll shows a small exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints from various phases of the artist. As an avowed realist Duwe has documented and commented on the social and political events, especially in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Unlike the abstract tendencies in art of the Federal Republic after 1945 the oeuvre of the Hamburg realist is marked by an object-bound and hands-on directness. It glosses over nothing. „Duwe’s painting is engaged, personally, emotionally and characterized by eruptive episodes that interfere with each other and fight against each other.“ So the director of the Kieler Kunsthalle, Jens Christian Jensen, writes for the exhibition in 1974. More than any other West German painter at the time Duwe consistently and critically reflected on the day to day events and held inexorably a mirror up to the people, which is why his works have learn not always unconditional encouragement, as it also was the case with Géricault, Goya or Grosz.
In his pictures Harald Duwe dealt with themes of postwar period, the world of consumption and work, with leisure, militarism and violence. It’s a „world of eating, drunkenness and killing“, as shortly and concisely formulated by the art historian Lothar Lang. The scenarios sometimes are giving shocking insights into the everyday life of an affluent society, making processes of alienation and self-alienation almost sensually perceptible. Revelations of this type, so brutal they may appear, don’t lose much in their actuality.
Harald Duwe was born in 1926 in the working class neighborhood Hamburg-Rothenburgsort. In 1942 he began an apprenticeship as a lithographer and art printer, which he continued in Leipzig after a break for military service in 1944. Even before the end of the war, he was trained in the Air Force for pilots – but it never came into use. After completing his apprenticeship Duwe studied from 1945 to 1950 at the State Art School in Hamburg (today HFBK) under Willem Grimm and Erich Hartmann. During this time he had a scholarship for two semesters at the Royal Academy in Stockholm. After graduating he worked as a freelance artist and married the painter Heilwig Ploog in 1951. They have three children. In 1964 Duwe became teacher for Spatial Representing at the Engineering School of Automotive Engineering in Hamburg and five years later member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). From 1975 until his death he taught at the University of Design in Kiel, Department Free Art / Painting. In 1984 Harald Duwe died in a traffic accident. Post mortem a big retrospective at the Kunsthalle zu Kiel took place in 1987.
The Galerie Poll represent the artist since 1973, in the collection of the Art Foundation Poll are several of his works. For the summer 2016 a retrospective entitled „Cosmos Duwe“ in Schloss Gottorf is in preparation (10 July to 30 October 2016).