Rainer Fetting

Beton

Zwischen Flexibilität und Starre, Individuum und Gesellschaft

Rainer Fetting (b. Wilhelmshaven, 1949; lives and works in Berlin and Sylt) was one of the cofounders of Galerie am Moritzplatz, established in 1977. His work was included in the seminal exhibition A New Spirit in Painting that Norman Rosenthal curated at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1981, then in the Zeitgeist show at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 1982. His characteristic visual language, a mode of figuration that combined reduction and exaggeration, has continued to evolve since the 1960s.

The selection of works presented in this monograph is dedicated to the theme of concrete, and in particular to the Berlin Wall, which figures prominently in Fetting’s oeuvre. He painted what he saw in Berlin and how the Wall’s concrete could be rendered in painting. “His Wall pictures,” Boris Pofalla has argued, “are a triumph over the non-architecture decreed by the East German ruling party as well as an expression of his commitment to painting as such.” The Wall pictures are complemented by a second major body of work: scenes by the sea featuring skaters, breakwaters, hotel buildings, and seawalls that demonstrate Fetting’s fascination with the contrast between concrete and sea, between civilization and nature. The range of works and previously unpublished documents gathered in the volume spans the decades from the artist’s early output of the 1960s to the present. With an essay by Boris Pofalla.