Description
Rolf Gith: *1950, Hamburg
Execution: drawing, mixed technique
Date: 5.8.1994
Dimensions: 14,5 x 11,5 cm
Signed: on the reverse
Provenance: original work from artist’s studio.
With his works Rolf Gith is one of the contemporary painters who revived the genre of still life in art. His works are in private and public ownership.
While still in school, Rolf Gith took private drawing and painting lessons with Arie Goral and Eduard Hopf. From 1968 to 1974 he studied painting with Hans Thiemann (student of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky) and Rudolf Hausner (Viennese School, Fantastic Realism) as well as visual communication at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. In 1971, the artist received the German National Academic Foundation for Painting, combined with study visits to Florence and Rome. Since 1974 Gith has worked as a painter, draftsman and designer. At first he paints large-format nudes. When he moved to Wiesbaden in 1981, a series of portraits and free drawings followed. His filigree physiognomies are exhibited in 1984 in the Kunsthaus Hamburg as part of the exhibition “Hans Thiemann and his students”. Between 1990 and 2001 he holds a teaching position at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, lectures at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and has a guest professorship at the University of the Arts in Bremen. In 2020, the Museum Marburg will dedicate a major retrospective to him with the exhibition “message of painting”.
Gith arranges small groups of objects, which he then transfers to the canvas in greatly enlarged form as a blow-up. In this way, Gith penetrates painterly into the innermost of the objects and heightens the sensual experience and thus presence of the things. The props in the paintings step out of their mundane role and take on a magical significance.
