Life and work
Grimm studied painting and sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Bobek and Joseph Beuys, among others. [1] [2] He created a new kind of multiples which he called "variation objects". [3] Several of his sculptures serve as commemorative monuments in public space. [4] [5]
A characteristic of Grimm's art is that he repeatedly created series [6] of objects, [7] drawings [8] or paintings [9] with similar motifs. In the object cycle "A Beautiful Piece of Germany" ("Ein schönes Stück Deutschland") [10] [11] Grimm presents on plates artificial pieces of cake of a special kind, which show the viewer bitingly ironic realities from Germany. [12] He also presents miniature landscapes and environments in buckets, bottles, mason jars, tins, books, as well as on chess boards and stones. [13] In his crucifix cycle, [14] [15] [16] [17] real crucifixes are redesigned and provided with additional motifs resulting in critical and sometimes sarcastic statements about the pious religiosity of our day. [18] [19] For his TV series [20] [21] [22] he uses dismantled old television sets, in whose housing he creates miniature landscapes on various themes.
According to Anna-Louise Mathieu, the instant recognition of Grimm's work "serves as the bait for his insidious trap: no sooner does the esthete, the admirer of the ingenious form flounder in it, than the artist begins to frighten us ... with unsavory details, he sprinkles his cynical observations in between, as if they were chocolate shavings." He illustrates his world view in "miniature environments thinking about the triangular deals regarding the monopoly of power and capital, about ecological murder, military and technological overkill. He breaks down the object of his pangs of conscience into bite-proof pieces, and adds a little joke of the bite-sized kind, so that we don't lose our appetite when we are frustrated." We "recognize ourselves: pushed onto the television set, pulled onto bottles, ... nailed to a chessboard, flushed down the toilet. ... Our register of sins, our common failure gawks at us as an aphorism." [23]
From time to time Grimm's works cause heated discussions. His "Mother Earth Chair" (1995), which shows a landscape with nature, factory chimneys and a tunnel on a gynecologist's chair and draws attention to the destructive human intervention in nature, has been rejected several times at exhibitions because of this object the dignity of the female sex could be sensitively affected and disturbed. [24] [25]
In 1981, Grimm was a co-founder of the Kulturkreis Dinslaken (KKD). [26] [27] He has taken part in 90 solo exhibitions and 203 group exhibitions in Germany, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the USA. So far 11 individual catalogs and 50 joint catalogs as well as over 1200 press articles in Germany and abroad have been published. [28] As of 2019, his work had been reported in nine radio and eighteen TV programs. [29]
On the occasion of Grimm's eightieth birthday, an extensive exhibition of his complete oeuvre was held at the Museum Voswinckelshof in Dinslaken from 20 August to 15 October 2023. [30] [31] Even the museum warned about the provocative works of art shown in this exhibition. [32]
Private life
Alfred Grimm lives in Hünxe. He is married to the art teacher and artist Barbara Grimm. [33] They have two sons and five grandsons. [34]
From 1972 until his retirement in early 2005, Grimm taught art at a German secondary school in Dinslaken. [35] [36] The German-American character animator Andreas Deja was one of Grimm's students. [37] To this day Grimm continues to work as a freelance artist, chiefly creating new object series. [38] [39]
Andreas Deja is a Polish-born German-American character animator, most noted for his work at Walt Disney Animation Studios. Deja's work includes serving as supervising animator on characters in several Disney animated films, including the Disney villains Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, Jafar in Aladdin, and Scar in The Lion King, the titular character in Hercules, and Lilo Pelekai in Lilo & Stitch.
Gotthard Graubner was a German painter, born in Erlbach, in Saxony, Germany.
Klaus Peter Brehmer, was a German painter, graphic artist and filmmaker. From 1971 to 1997 he was professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg.
Thomas Reinhold is an Austrian painter, one of the initiators of so-called “New Painting”.
Anatol Herzfeld was a German sculptor and mixed-media artist, and also a policeman. A student of Joseph Beuys, he primarily used wood, iron and stone as materials. As an artist, he simply signed Anatol. He received attention for a happening, crossing the Rhine in a boat he created with Beuys, after Beuys had been expelled from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
DAIM is a German graffiti artist who lives and works in Hamburg. He is particularly known for his large-size, 3D-style graffiti works. This has become known as his trademark. For his technically sophisticated style he obtained the reputation of being one of the best graffiti artists in the world.
Bruno Kurz is a German painter. He primarily works on reflective surfaces such as metal, creating paintings of great luminosity and depth – expansive colour fields with vague allusions to landscape and flora. Apart from painting, his work comprises large art installations fashioned through light.
Barbara Schober is a German visual artist. Her work covers a broad range of various media in which the term "Internet Awareness" plays an important role. With ancient techniques and material experiments, she sets a counterpoint to the pervasive digital world. Schober uses photography and freeze-frames, creates digital and analog collages and (re-)digitizes, paints over, or applies material objects to them. She integrates intentionally or randomly created structures elsewhere in her work. A major topic in Schober's work is a dynamic play with perspective and dimensions which continuously destabilizes the position of the viewer. The spontaneous, the accidental and art-trouvé is as important as the artist's personal involvement with the object or the topic. The focus is on liminal areas, precarious balances and pivotal moments in photography, sculpture, film and painting.
Heather Sheehan is an American artist who lives and works in Cologne, Germany. In her work, she combines elements of sculpture, installation, performance, video art and black and white photography. Her work focuses on the development and presentation of individual mythologies.
Scott Holmquist is a conceptual artist who produces books, archives, and multi-media installations. He is best known for his work on African immigrant drug dealers in Berlin and Northern California cannabis growers.
Rita Rohlfing is a German painter, photographer and installation artist.
Ingo Kühl is a German painter, sculptor and architect.
Karl Müller, also Carl Müller was a German late Nazarene painter of the Düsseldorf school of painting.
Carl Maria Seyppel, also Karl Maria Seyppel, was a German genre and portrait painter, caricaturist, and writer, based in Düsseldorf.
Ernst Otto Köpke, also EO Köpke (November 19, 1914 in Diez - August 16, 2009 in Hamburg] was a German painter and graphic artist. His oeuvre, spanning a creative period of 70 years from 1934 to 2004, is very diverse. In addition to its main focus on stained glass, paintings and print graphics it also includes numerous works of commercial art, art in architecture, mosaics, book illustration as well as sketches for liturgical paraphernalia, for jewellery and for ceramic sculptures.
Magnus Weidemann was a German painter, graphic artist, photographer and writer. He was a co-founder of naturism in the life reform.
The art collection of Carl Sachs, a Jewish entrepreneur who lived with his wife Margarethe in a villa in what was then Kleinburgstraße in Breslau, before 1939 he emigrated to Switzerland with his wife to escape Nazi persecution, included numerous paintings, watercolors and graphics.
Frederick the Great was the subject of many portraits. Many were painted during Frederick's life, and he would give portraits of himself as gifts. Almost all portraits of Frederick are idealized and do not reflect how he looked according to his death mask. It has been suggested that the most accurate representation of Frederick may be the picture of a flautist from William Hogarth's series Marriage A-la-Mode.
Monument to the old Jewish cemetery on the Doelen (2021) by Grimm at the Dinslaken city park
This memorial work is reminiscent of Elly Eichelgrün, a hat and milliner. In 1941 she fled to the United States via the Netherlands.
"Memorial in memory of the expulsion of the Jews from Dinslaken" by Grimm in the city park.
