Fritz Klemm

Fritz Klemm was a late bloomer, a late discovery. It was not until 1951, at the age of almost 50, that he began to paint; he dismissed everything he had done before as ‘finger exercises’. In 1972, at the age of 70, he held his first solo exhibition. Throughout his life, Fritz Klemm was an underappreciated artist, a fact linked in part to his low-key nature. His self-portraits depict him as an empty silhouette behind painting materials or as a fragile figure, pushed to the margins by a curtain that dominates the picture. The self is not expressed in the portrait, but in his actions, symbolised by the easel, brushes and paints. ‘My realism is firmly rooted in vividness, dry in its execution and succinct in its message,’ is how the artist described his work a few years before his death in 1990. This stands in an interesting contrast to the effect his paintings have. By detaching himself from the objects in his depictions, Klemm brings the depicted things to life: the viewer is challenged to reverse the creative process, to reconnect the things with reality, to ‘translate’ them back, and to perceive them anew. The line separates the planes, structures and establishes proportions, whilst the plasticity of the material used does the rest to allow Fritz Klemm’s paintings to speak for themselves. There is nothing more to it, and nothing more is needed.

Biographical information
Fritz Klemm (*1902 in Mannheim) studied at the Badische Landeskunstschule Karlsruhe in the 1920s before working as an art teacher at various schools. from 1948 to 1970, he taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. In the last two decades of his life, Klemm devoted himself exclusively to his own work. The artist died in Karlsruhe in 1990.