Harald Metzkes

On 23 January 2014, Harald Metzkes will turn 85. To mark the occasion, the Leonhardi Museum in Dresden is honouring the work of this important painter with an exhibition in the city where Metzkes once took key artistic steps. This small retrospective features paintings from the years 1952–2013 and traces the key stages of a long artistic career. Building on a painterly repertoire shaped by breaks and experiments, Metzkes developed his own unique artistic universe over the decades – driven by the urge to bring the visible into our inner world, as he himself once wrote. In doing so, he draws on classical subjects such as landscape, the nude and still life, yet he also draws inspiration from mythological, biblical and literary sources. 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.