Norbert Tadeusz

Norbert Tadeusz biography

Born in Dortmund, Norbert Tadeusz studied at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf (1961-1966), first in Gerhard Hoehme’s painting class and then in Joseph Beuys’s sculpting class. Tadeusz was particularly attracted to the Italian and Flemish old masters. However, as the Düsseldorf art scene was dominated by abstraction and Fluxus, his representational style did not meet with much popularity. Even within the New Figuration of the 1970s and 1980s, his oeuvre had a place of its own.

His large-format paintings, often with a bird’s eye perspective, show horses and nudes, often in dramatically disturbing and distorted poses as well as circus and studio scenes where the scenery or premises are unclear and surreal. His style is dominated by vivid brushstrokes, bright colours and a complex and distinctive interplay of light and shadow. The strictness of form and the atmosphere in Tadeusz’s paintings display a certain kinship to the interiors of artists such as Edward Hopper and also the style of Giorgio de Chirico’s views of squares, whereas his dissolving bodies are sometimes reminiscent of Lucian Freud. From 1973 to 1988, Tadeusz taught in Münster, at the Department of Art Education of the State Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf. From 1988 to 1991, he held a professorship at the College of Fine Arts in Berlin, and from 1991 to 2003 at the College of Fine Arts in Braunschweig. Tadeusz was one of the first artists with a studio at the Museum Insel Hombroich in Neuss, where a pavilion has been dedicated to him. A retrospective of his works was held by the Mönchehaus Museum in Goslar in 2010.