Harald Metzkes

Harald Metzkes will be 85 years old on 23 January 2014. To mark the occasion, the Leonhardi Museum Dresden is honouring the work of this important painter with an exhibition in the city where Metzkes once took his first major artistic steps. The small retrospective shows paintings from the years 1952 - 2013 and makes important stages of a long artistic life comprehensible. Building on a painterly repertoire resulting from breaks and experiments, Metzkes developed his very own artistic cosmos over the decades - out of the urge to bring the visible into our interior, as he himself once wrote. He uses classical subjects such as landscapes, nudes and still lifes, but he also draws on mythological, biblical and literary material. In his paintings we encounter figures and situations from Cervantes, Villon, Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne and the Commedia dell'arte.

Biography
Harald Metzkes was born in Bautzen in 1929, studied at the HfBK Dresden under Wilhelm Lachnit from 1949 to 1953 and was a master student at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin from 1955 to 1958. He is categorised as belonging to the so-called "Berlin School" and worked from an aesthetic stance that differed significantly from the doctrine of "socialist realism" in the GDR.