Heinrich Siepmann

About the work

Heinrich Siepmann initially underwent artistic training at the Folkwangschule in Essen. As early as 1928 he began working as a freelance artist, before obtaining a scholarship between 1936 and 1940 to copy the old masters housed in the Städtisches Museum Heilbronn, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and in the Kasseler Galerien. Subsequently in 1938, he attended the State Academy of Applied Arts in Nuremberg.
In the early years of his career, Heinrich Siepmann's output was largely dominated by stilllifes and landscape painting; not until 1948 did he start exploring the new currents of abstract post-war art. He spent the initial years of the Second World War as a soldier in Flanders, France and Italy, and then in captivity as a prisoner of war.
During the intellectual and artistic renewal of West German art and culture, Siepmann was involved as co-founder in the artistic group known as the "junge westen", which, following the years under the artistic diktat of the National Socialists, sought to reintegrate itself into the international art scene.
Within Siepmann's oeuvre the medium of the collage is closely associated with his embrace of constructivistic forms. Although even his initial works were already characterised by constructivistic design elements and a spatial arrangement of architectures, objects and landscapes, the artist did not engage in his intensive pre-occupation with a purely concrete-constructivist language of form until the early 1970s.
Heinrich Siepmann's collages represent a highly impressive body of late-period works which, despite their reduced repertoire of form, exude a compelling fascination by virtue of their infinite spectrum of variations and visual dynamism - as evidenced in the harmonious equilibrium of the diagonal and horizontal pictorial elements of this present work.
(Andrea Fink)