Peter Angermann

'Rotterdam'

December 18, 2022 - February 12, 2023

opening Sunday 18 december, 13.00 hrs

Forty years ago, Peter Angermann had his international breakthrough in Rotterdam. Curator Gosse Oosterhof presented a series of ground-breaking exhibitions at the Rotterdam based Galerie 't Venster, including a solo exhibition by Peter Angermann in 1981. This exhibition was part of the emerging figurative-expressionist art movement of that time. As brutal and violent as punk once shook up the world of pop music, this neo-expressionism manifested itself in the world of visual arts in the 1980s. And in Rotterdam it became clear that Angermann's work was part of this movement. Galerie Delta by Hans Sonnenberg was located in the same building as Galerie 't Venster. Not only did Sonnenberg buy a lot of Angermann's work, but afterwards he often showed his work in his gallery in Rotterdam.

Initially, from 1966 to 1968, Peter Angermann, who was born in 1945 in Rehau, a small town in Upper Franconia in Bavaria, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg, Then, in autumn 1968, he was drawn to the class run by Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Constantly showered with his teacher’s praise, he nevertheless – or perhaps precisely for that reason – became co-founder of the legendary YIUP group, which from 1969 on attracted attention inside the academy, and above all in the Beuys class, through provocative actions that were directed even against Beuys himself. On leaving the academy in 1972, Angermann saw that in artistic terms, he had come away empty-handed; his passion for painting had not exactly been fostered by Beuys. Not until a year later, once he had largely jettisoned Beuys’s ideas, did Angermann make a new start in the field of painting. A meeting with his former classmate Milan Kunc proved exceptionally fruitful in this situation. Together they developed a new visual language that was closely oriented to everyday life, while simultaneously being fired by a witty, anarchic impulse. In 1979 Jan Knap joined the two friends, and Gruppe NORMAL was born. They championed the rejection of individualism and, in line with this, created a large number of joint works – paintings that in some cases were done in public. By 1981, however, each of the three members had progressed so far in his own artistic development that it was decided to disband the group. Standing now on his own two feet, Peter Angermann has retained the socio-critical impulse from his earlier works – coupled with that provocative and at times absurdist humour that marks many of his paintings to this day. After his launch in Rotterdam in 1981, Angermann had an exhibition of his paintings and drawings in the famous gallery of Riekje Swart in Amsterdam. In 1986 he surprised the world by exploring a genre which at that time was frowned on: en plein air painting. In the meantime, this group of works has found a permanent place in his oeuvre and has led him to discover a virtuosity as colourist that also distinguishes his mature, themed works. The two of them – his themed works and his landscapes – alternate without more ado in Angermann’s work, and it is this liaison that makes Angermann so unique in today’s art scene. Parallel to this, Peter Angermann has also passed his artistic experience on to a new generation of artists by professorships at several Academies of Arts in Germany. In 2013 Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld organized a large exhibition about the work of Peter Angermann ‘Licht am Horizont’, accompanied by an extensive retrospective catalogue with the same title.

Almost thirty years ago Angermann made his home one hour’s car drive away from Nuremberg, in Thurndorf, where, far removed from the turmoil of the art business, he continues to dedicate himself enthusiastically to the medium that holds every possibility of artistic development open to him: painting

Galerie VIVID is proud to show a broad overview of this important figurative painter. Again in Rotterdam, after so many years.