Karl Fred Dahmen

Previous owner: Dieter Monheim, Aachen
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection; VAN HAM Kunstauktionen, 2013

Solo exhibitions:
2017
‘Karl Fred Dahmen. Das Prinzip Leidenschaft.’, Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg
1965
‘Karl Fred Dahmen’, Museumsverein Aachen, Aachen; Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen

Karl Fred Dahmen was an artist who was always interested in his immediate surroundings. The informal works of the Stolberg period bear witness to the influence of the open-cast mining landscape of his homeland near Aachen. In a very authentic way he transformed perceived representationalism into abstract painting. He showed how the Eifel landscape had been scarred and destroyed, disfigured and changed by industry and lignite mines. He was not concerned with landscape painting in the conventional sense; instead, the material of paint is the actual subject at the centre of his artistic work: ‘In painting, I allow myself a great deal of freedom initially; I pursue the ambivalence of the unfixable, the changeable, the surprising in movement for as long as it pleases me. Only then, when I have reinforced enough material in terms of colour, does the actual artistic work begin, whereby I proceed from top to bottom. It is about digging in and hollowing out, covering over again and overlaying, a coquetting with the “peinture”. The working processes continue, again and again, each one subsequently covered over, almost completely erased. I don’t paint a landscape, I make it.’ [1]

By means of this procedure, in dealing with the painting material on the canvas, he imitates the processes that have also formed and destroyed his surroundings. Employing a variety of techniques and material collages, he created relief-like paintings influenced by the works of the École de Paris. Dahmen first visited Paris in 1951. He then founded the Neue Aachener Gruppe with some colleagues in 1952 inspired by the new ideas of the Paris School and its main representatives Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. His contacts in France enabled him to organise the first German-French exhibition in 1953 at the Aachen Museum Society under the title ‘Malerei von Heute’ (‘Painting of Today’). Dahmen’s successful and internationally acclaimed artistic career in the 1960s and 1970s ended far too early – the artist died at the age of 63 in Preinersdorf in Chiemgau as a result of a brain tumour.

[1] Karl Fred Dahmen, 1963 quoted from: K. F. Dahmen, ed. by Manfred de la Motte, Galerie Hennemann, Bonn 1979, p. 198.