Printing is an adventure

Working out motifs from a wooden stick in a powerful and focussed manner is a form of artistic expression that HAP Grieshaber was deeply suited to. After training as a typesetter, he studied commercial graphics and letterpress printing at the Stuttgart School of Arts and Crafts.
He subsequently acquired the wealth of forms he developed in figurative art during his stays and travels in England, Egypt, Nubia and Greece, among other places. Grieshaber earned his living there with his craft and was able to exhibit his first works, in which he intensively analysed the countries, people and customs. His personal, political commitment matured through his experiences as a soldier and prisoner of war in the Second World War, during the years of war full of lack of freedom and repression.
In 1951, Grieshaber was appointed as a teacher at the Bernstein School near Sulz am Neckar. At the private art school in the Bernstein monastery, which he had a significant influence on during his short teaching career, he was able to experiment more freely in the spacious studio of the monastery church, perfect his independent style and, last but not least, devote himself to the large format he had been aiming for for some time. He gave his students the freedom to find their own way. Teaching assignments followed. In 1955, Grieshaber was appointed Erich Heckel's successor at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, where he worked until his retirement in 1959. In the end, he felt artistically and politically restricted there.
In the 1950s, HAP Grieshaber created a series of compellingly expressive and virtuoso hand prints in small editions. It was not he as an artist who chose the large format, but "the idea of the woodcut chooses to be large", he said in an interview with SWR in 1964. This is also understandable for the viewer: Overlapping motifs and dynamic forms powerfully fill the large format.
In his woodcuts, he found a graphic language that has attained timeless validity in its symbolic imagery and is particularly topical today, as the prints Korean Mother and Bound Dove demonstrate.
The exhibition is a co-operation with the Freundeskreis Grieshaber e. V.

Last edited on 23.08.2024