Born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1920, has been initially trained as goldsmith. After World War II, he studied at the State Academy of Graphics and Book Art in Leipzig, and started to paint. In 1948, he fled with his family to Bavaria where he stayed and worked at the Tegernsee until his death.

Basically, he was an autodidact. Yet, in 1952, he met as a 32 y/o young artist just by chance Emil Nolde at the Commeter Gallery in Hamburg. That had a major influence on his development as painter. He became a neo-expressionist, was even termed to be Nolde’s scholar, while developing his own distinct artistic style on wide landscapes, cloud formations, and flowing floral forms. Another focus was the ambivalence of human existence. Every year since 1974, he spent several months at the Italian Riviera, where he was adored by the Mediterranean light.

In 1984, after developing an allergy against turpentine, he was forced to abandon oil painting and was forced to focus on water color painting only. He developed that technique to an unsurpassed mastership creating unusually large-scale works. He painted wet-on-wet on thick laid paper, so that the watercolor paint could be applied in thick layers. That creates the intense, glowing, and luminous colors so typical for that artist. He never adapted to main-stream art movements and remained figuratively expressive, even though he explored the limits of abstraction in his “meditative landscapes”. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in London, Paris, New York, and Beijing. He died in 2010.

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