GÜNTER FRUHTRUNK

After finishing secondary school he studied architecture at the “Technische Hochschule” in Munich, which he gave up after two semesters to join the army as a volunteer in the fall of 1941. During the war the artist began to draw and paint landscapes in watercolour, probably to balance his war experience. In 1945 Fruhtrunk began to study privately under the painter and printmaker William Straube in Neufrach, who was a student of Hölzel and Matisse. In 1948 Fruhtrunk met Willi Baumeister and in 1949 he became acquainted with Julius Bisier. According to the artist himself, theses encounters led him towards abstract painting. In 1954 he received a scholarship from the Land Baden-Württemburg and the government Français and moved to Paris, to work with the studios of Léger and Arp. In 1955 Günter Fruhtrunk first showed the results of his work to the public at an exhibition of the René Drouin’s Cercle Volnay in Paris. During the 1960s the painter mainly lived and worked in Paris and in France. In 1961 he received the Prix Jean Arp in Cologne and in 1966 he was awarded the silver medal of the Prix d’Europe in Ostende. In 1963 Fruhtrunk’s works were shown in a retrospective at the “Museum am Ostwall” in Dortmund. In the winter semester of 1967/68 Fruhtrunk began teaching at the Munich art academy. His participation in documenta 4 indicates how important the artist was for German art history after World War II. It was Fruhtrunk who transformed the idea of constructivism to a colourful rhythmical pictorial world, by creating a dynamic language of from with the vector-like diagonal lines arranged strictly rhythmically according to their alternating colors.