Biography

1903, Brockmann was born in Cologne on 19 November, the son of the painter Hans Waldemar Brockmann.

After attending school and briefly studying architecture, he trained as a painter from 1920 to 1922.

1920 Encounter with Heinrich Hoerle, Anton Räderscheidt, Franz W. Seiwert. Hoerle becomes his friend and mentor.

1926 Moved to Düsseldorf and began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts (free and applied graphics)

1928 Master student of Heinrich Campendonk; Studio in the "Hungerturm".

1931 Member of the Düsseldorf section of the "ASSO". Draws with Otto Pankok; Campendonk arranges participation in an exhibition in New York.

1932 Completion of studies and start of a teaching assignment at the Academy; Election as a member of the board of directors of the "Rheinischen Sezession"; Marriage to the sculptor Marianne Reunert.

1933 Brockmann is banned from the academy and evades the persecution of the SA by fleeing to Berlin (place of residence of his parents-in-law)

1933-42 in Berlin. Manual work as a means of earning a living.

1942-45 War Service and American Prisoner of War

1945-52 in Hof an der Saale. Resumption of independent artistic activity.

1952 Relocation to Kiel and appointment as cultural advisor.

1955-1970 Teacher training at the Muthesius-Werkschule in Kiel; 1964 Culture Prize of the City of Kiel; 1975 Appointment as professor

1983 Gottfried Brockmann dies in Kiel on 9 July.

Exhibition
Gottfried Brockmann
und der magische Realismus

February 22 - March 22, 2024

In the 1920s, Gottfried Brockmann belonged to the artists' group Kölner Progressive around the painters Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and Heinrich Hoerle, whose common intention was to document the people and social structures of their time in pictures. Their basic question was the seriousness of life and art, as Hans Schmitt-Rost (publicist, 1901 Essen – 1978 Cologne) describes it: "Our life was by no means unrestrained, anarchic, amoral, rather thoughtful, modest, frugal, humane."

His work is characterized by a kind of realism that can be described as both naïve and magical at the same time, because the artist approaches the objects and figures with great sympathy and does not take away their magic, their enigma. Brockmann wittily plays with pictorial contradictions such as space and surface and the motivic irony against the background of a mostly constructed pictorial framework.