*17.07.1940
biography
When the artist Otmar Alt, born in 1940 in Werningerode, Harz, began studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin in 1960, non-objective abstraction in the sense of Art Informel dominated the German art scene.
After completing his studies as a master student under Hermann Bachmann, Otmar Alt worked as a stage design assistant in Trier and Frankfurt. He also had his first exhibitions. His second solo exhibition at the Berlin Galerie Katz already received public recognition and positive reviews.
Further exhibitions at home and abroad, prizes - such as the Franz Roh Prize for King Cloud in 1965 - and projects followed, which demonstrated both the growing popularity and the versatility of the artist and craftsman Otmar Alt: In addition to paintings, graphics and sculptures, he also created children's books, Olympic posters, wall and facade designs, fountain systems, stage sets, and much more... .
There seem to be no limits to his creative joy and desire to experiment. He finds it particularly fascinating to work with new materials and techniques. He integrates artisans into the creation process of his works, who implement his ideas and designs in constant dialogue with the artist.
Otmar Alt is just as unapologetic about the popularization of art as he is about the material – without being tied to a mainstream:
Whether it's designing phone cards, porcelain, cars, T-shirts, umbrellas or children's toys, Otmar Alt is open to all ideas. Banal everyday objects become small works of art that should be accessible to everyone - regardless of age or level of education.
While formal honorary awards - such as being named a Citizen of the Ruhr Area in 1994 and being awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 1998 - demonstrate public recognition, the numerous exhibitions at home and abroad prove that Otmar Alt is one of the most successful German contemporary artists today.
Artistic development His first works, still untitled and still reduced in color, reveal the influence of the prevailing Informel movement with their spontaneous and expressive brushwork. Early on, one discovers timidly suggested figures and symbols in his pictures, which he eventually raises to new levels of meaning with imaginative titles, e.g. Baldi the Happy 1964, Portrait of King Cloud with his Green Goat 1966.
At the same time, his preference for intense colors and soon also for clearly defined forms from the animal and plant world and contours becomes apparent. In the mid-1960s, Otmar Alt's trademark "puzzle pictures" became almost reminiscent of prints or Pop Art with their precise outlines and color fields.
By the 1980s at the latest, the shapes and contours began to break up, the colors lost their ability to cover, and the restless brushwork evoked memories of the informal beginnings. Otmar Alt approached the subject of man via the path of metamorphosis and began to tell fables about the "strangeness of life."
The mood in his narrative pictures changes: Behind the facade of the colorful, cheerful fantasy worlds, a serious hidden meaning becomes increasingly noticeable. Otmar Alt's style has been associated with artists of classical modernism, such as Miró, Matisse, Arp, Kandinsky and Klee. There are, of course, similarities here and there in terms of the expressiveness of the colors or the way in which he creates new fantasy figures from a mixture of organic forms and implied figuration.
In direct comparison, however, Otmar Alt remains an artist with an unmistakable language, a characterful individualist and loner.
