Rainer Fetting

December 20, 2014

Dea K.

Rainer Fetting is a German painter and sculptor, born in 1949. He created a large oeuvre of expressive figurative paintings and portraits, covering many different kinds of subject-matter, as well as many bronze sculptures. He also produced Berlin cityscapes, in which the Wall features largely as a central motif.

Fetting was born in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. He first completed studies as a carpenter, then worked as a stage designer, which followed his moving to Berlin. He is best known as one of the co-founders and main protagonists of the Galerie am Moritzplatz in Berlin, founded in the late 1970s by a group of young artists at the former Berlin Art Academy. It was created as a self-help project, in order to be able to exhibit their colorful figurative paintings in an art scene still dominated by minimalism, conceptual art, as well as Berlin Realism. This group of artists, known as the Moritzboys and including, among others, Salomé, Bernd Zimmer, and Helmut Middendorf, subsequently achieved international acclaim as the Junge Wilde or Neue Wilde in the early 1980s. In this period, Fetting strove to capture the atmosphere of West Berlin where frequent student protests and the homosexual rights movement provided powerful impetus for societal change in spite of constraints caused by the Wall. Through his expressive cityscapes in the Neue Wilde style, Fetting became a sensitive observer of this atmosphere, and his depictions of the Wall, in particular, with their decisive style and vibrant color palette, represent a vital metropolis welcoming of alternative lifestyles.

At an early stage, Fetting tried out different image perceptions, stylistically based on Impressionism and Expressionism. A DAAD scholarship allowed him to visit New York in 1978. This experience rapidly impacted his style, adding dynamic and movement to his paintings. Up to this point, his art had often been characterized as flat, but he began to use bright colors and strong, dynamic lines that gave his pieces a newfound energy.
In his work since 1982, Fetting has increasingly concerned himself with the depiction of the modern human condition. His view of the vulnerability of the individual in the face of an unintelligible and frequently hostile world puts Fetting in a tradition that stretches back through Kirchner and Nolde, to Van Gogh and Munch. Since 1984, while in New York, Rainer created works in which he mounted driftwood on canvas, overpainted it and integrated it into the composition of the picture.

The first bronze works did not appear until the second half of the 1980s. The bronze sculpture of former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, created for the SPD party headquarters in Bonn, now in Berlin, is his best known work. The most recent works attend increasingly to the metropolis of New York, in which the artist makes an issue of the city’s dark peripheral areas.

His work was presented in numerous group and solo exhibitions, throughout the world.

Rainer Fetting divides his time living and painting both in New York and in Berlin, Germany.