Norbert Prangenberg (June 23, 1949 — June 29, 2012) was an abstract painter, sculptor, and engraver who was born in Nettseheim, just outside of Cologne, Germany. Though he had no formal training and did not fully engage with art until his 30s, Prangenberg did finally come up with a style that was uniquely his own, not fitting comfortably into the neo-expressionist or neo-geo movements of his time, in the 1970s and 1980s. At this time, he was considered a major figure in contemporary German art. Though he got his start with abstract paintings, he also became known for making sculptures of all sizes; and while his work initially appears abstract, the titles given sometimes allude to the human body or a landscape. As a trained gold- and silversmith, as well as a glassblower, he always showed an attention to materials and how they could be physically engaged with. He was interested in how his own two hands could affect the painting or sculpture's surface. Traces of the artist's hand appear literally throughout his entire oeuvre, before he lost the battle with liver cancer in 2012.

Biography

At age 13, Prangenberg was studying to be a gold- and silversmith. After three and a half years of study and a year working for a small company, he attended a werkkunstchule (school for crafts) until the age of 23. Once he was finished with his studies he began working at a glass factory, making designs for wine glasses and vases. At this point, he began dabbling with his own independent drawing and painting. From the age of 26 to 29, he continued freelancing at various glass factories and became a father of two. At this time, he also became critically engaged with the surrounding art world in Cologne and Düsseldorf, visiting galleries and museums frequently and seeing art by leading visionaries such as Jasper Johns and Yves Klein. By the age of 30, Prangenberg felt confident that he was making art that was uniquely his. On a whim, he contacted museum curator Johannes Cladders who began championing his work immediately and connecting him to other curators and dealers. By the 1980s, he becomes a full-time artist, moving organically between watercolor, sculpture, and oil painting, sometimes simultaneously. Throughout his artistic career he always kept a fine eye on material and sought to experiment with how his own hand could change the surface of an abstract painting or bulbous sculpture.

Artistic style

Prangenberg's initial forays into art making were in the 1980s and his interests were focused primarily on color and structure. His medium of choice was watercolor on paper or canvas and his easel of choice was in fact not an easel at all, but the floor. Only after he was done would he stretch the painting over stretcher bars. He continued using this process until 2007. According to John Yau, these early paintings were "planes of luminous color inhabited by geometric forms, which seem to have been scooped out."^[1] Yau may have made use of the words "scooped out" because Prangenberg was using an impasto technique, applying the paint in a thick manner that allowed the surfaces to be cut into.

By the 1990s, Prangenberg was also working with sculpture. Annegret Laabs, writing in 2008 in the artist's monograph, "Norbert Prangenberg: Venustas et Fortuna," explained: “Up to the mid-1990s, the focus of his ceramic works was to be found in large, bulbous, hollow forms, usually lying on their side, which were characterized by the independent movement of the glass flux that surrounds the terracotta when it is fired, and which ultimately merges light and darkness, the visible and the imaginary, or, indeed, keeps them apart.”^[2] However, after the mid-1990s, Pragnenberg rotates these large scale, monumental sculptures so that they are standing, mimicking a standing human body. Yet, they maintain the same spontaneous, playful, organic nature of the ones resting on their sides. His sculptures also show an interest in materiality; in certain parts of the clay forms you can see where his fingerprints have affected the surface by way of holes, notches, and incisions.

In the 2000s, he switched up his painting and sculpting techniques substantially. In 2007, he stopped painting with watercolors directly on the floor and focused, instead, on oil painting on easels. These abstract paintings tended to have distinct areas within the composition. This way of making a painting within a painting informed his later ceramic sculptures. In 2012, he was awarded a six-week residency in the ceramics studio at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers. Though he was battling liver cancer at the time, he churned out many small scale works. Writing about the works in 2014, Roberta Smith noted that his "small, ebullient tabletop works convey a wildness typical of kindergarteners."^[3] Going one step further, Ben La Rocco wrote of the pieces: “One finds tiny landscapes, portrait heads, a stag, what looks like fragments of architecture, byzantine patterning, abstractions, and other bits of imagery painted into the glazes, creating a miniature exhibition of painting within the sculpture exhibition.”^[4] In fact, Prangenberg named these works exclusively either "Kopf" (head) or "Landschaft" (landscape), perhaps encouraging us to look past the initial estimate of abstraction. Additionally, many of them had smaller surfaces with painting on them; it was as if many works of art made up one small sculpture.

Exhibitions

References