Fred Thieler

(Königsberg 1916 - 1999 Berlin)
Author: Hans Günter Golinski Fred Thieler Directly affected by Nazi barbarism as a half-Jew and forced into speechlessness, Fred Thieler sublimates his inner development through painting. Thrown upon it by external pressures, his pictorial world initially remains attached to the external; in the conventional style of the Munich Academy he depicts people, landscapes and arranged still lifes. After the war he continued on his 'involuntary' path, seeking to locate himself in art and thus in society; the first cautious attempts at liberation from the object took place in his paintings. He was helped in this by the Munich association of artists and theoreticians ZEN 49, which since this year has been proclaiming the step forward into the uncertain new and calling for a break with those who "look backwards and stand still" (Geiger). This attitude, which is both artistic and political, strives to distance itself from the direct experience of the Nazi dictatorship and the war; for the artists, a concrete coming to terms and settling of accounts with the recent German past would mean a substantive engagement with this unculture in their works. Instead, they take a stand beyond ideologies. For Thieler, it is something "fundamental that came out of the post-war period. We started with the absolute condemnation of ideologies ... And of course it is difficult to live without ideologies, it simply means living without security ..." His generation, he said, had tried "not to attach ourselves to anything, but only to find a validity of our own recognised by us and for us, with all the uncertainty in our images ..." For Thieler, too, a new perspective on painting took place in the early 1950s; he, too, experimented with its means and pursued painting as a 'researching activity'. The economy of the informal meant to him the emptying of painting of outdated contents and forms, the reaching of a zero point from which it could be individually reassigned. He frees himself from his artistic past, that is, the objects and contents; the informal concept means his new beginning in that painting becomes for him communication in itself. Born out of the social need to communicate with each other in a visual way and having reached its highest form in this function, painting once again finds itself at a point of ideological overload that runs counter to its nature. In contrast, there is the danger of a total loss of meaning, of a slide into the arbitrary, which results in the decorative form. Painting serves dialogue, is a means of communication, painting as language must be comprehensible, "work itself out according to certain figures and central themes, which congeal into models, which, for lack of a better word, are called forms. But if form, then in the sense that it incorporates the whole scope of its completely unlimited, unpredictable and overflowing structural development." (Jaroslav Serpan). Thieler sets this dialogue in motion in an art-immanent way and conducts it with pictorial means, above all colour, as an analogue to the unmediated human dialogue. Dialogue means an activity that serves communication, exchange and knowledge, and represents an elementary expression of existence. To give it an adequate form is the content of Thieler's painting. "For me, being a painter means leading the existence of a contemporary who spends the main part of his existence trying to show the impulses of his life: stimuli as well as depressions, intuitions as well as calculating considerations, reactions from individual results as well as chains of experiences in a painterly way - or to gain them in the painting process. Painting means for me to register the analogies and differences of experience and to bring a result into being that, released from the painting process, presents itself and offers itself as a reflection of human experience of existence for the viewer as well as for the painter."

1916
Born in Königsberg

1936 - 1941
Medical studies and military service

1941
Study ban

1946 - 1950
studies painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich with Carl Caspar
Member of the artist group ZEN 49

1951 - 1953
Stays in Paris
studies in the "Atelier 17" with Stanley William Hayter
Contacts with Hans Hartung, Serge Poliakoff and Pierre Soulages

Since 1953
Member of the "Neue Gruppe München

since 1954
Member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berlin

1955
Participation in the first post-war exhibition of German art in Paris at the "Cercle Volney", Paris
Premio Lissone, Italy

1958
Participation in the XXIX Venice Biennale with Rolf Cavael, K.O.Götz, Emil Schumacher, K.R.H. Sonderborg

1959
Professorship at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts (until 1981)
Participation in the "documenta II

1964
Participation in the "documenta III

1967
Participation in the World Exhibition in Montreal, German Pavilion

1972 - 1973
Visiting professor at the College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, USA

since 1978
Member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin and the Neue Darmstädter Sezession, Darmstadt

since 1979
Member of the International Society for Fine Arts, Paris
(1979 - 1984 Vice-President, since 1984 Honorary President)

1980 - 1983
Vice-President of the Academy of Arts Berlin

1985
Lovis Corinth Prize
Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

1991
Foundation of the Fred Thieler Prize for Painting, Art Prize for Young Artists

1999
died in Berlin