Rainer Fetting

Their course brushwork, bright colours and expressively figurative style reflected a European-wide trend of the early 1980s. Fetting’s recourse to Brücke Expressionism can also be seen in his favourite subjects – the human body and life in a big city. After the fall of the Berlin Wall he also started to paint landscapes of the area around Berlin. Many of his paintings feature Vincent van Gogh as a recurring figure of identification. In his large-format paintings, Fetting uses diluted emulsion, with dripping traces that symbolise the spontaneity of the act of painting. But Fetting also created a large number of sculptures, including bronze sculptures and assemblages of objets trouvés. Fetting became known to a wider audience through two exhibitions: “A New Spirit in Painting” at the Royal Academy of Art in London (1981) and “Zeitgeist” at the Gropius Bau in Berlin (1982). In addition, a major exhibition was dedicated to the artist by Kunsthalle Tübingen in 2010. Fetting lives in Berlin and New York.