Kathe Kollwitz
For our fifth week, we looked at a range of amazing female artists (Kathe Kollwitz, Marjane Satrapi and Emil Ferris). I chose to research further into Kathe Kollwitz because of the dark, melancholy atmosphere that seemed to be in her art work, it made me curious of the context of her work.
Kathe Kollwitz was a 20th century, German artist who worked with painting, printmaking and sculpture. Born in 1861 in Konigsberg, East Prussia, she grew up in a middle-class family who supported her interests in art. From 1884 to 1885, she studied art in Berlin and then from 1888 to 1889, she studied in Munich. Later in life, Kollwitz, along side artists: Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Vincent van Gogh and many more, was apart of the 'Expressionism' movement in art.
Expressionism is a piece of art in were the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist's inner feelings or ideas. The gallery below shows art work produced during the 'Expressionism' movement, excluding Kollwitz's work as I will be going into more depth about her work separately.
I really like a lot of the work from the expressionism period, I find it interesting having to analyse the paintings to get an understanding of what the artists' feelings or ideas were during the paintings' creation process. The gallery below showcases some of Kollwitz's own work.
Like I mentioned prior, a lot of Kollwitz's work has a melancholy atmosphere to it, I think this is mostly to do with the relief printing Kollwitz would use for her work. Relief printmaking is when you cut or etch a printing surface so that the only thing left is the design to be printed. I really like how the the prints look visually, they have a gritty texture to them and only have the one colour (black), it creates a disturbing tone in each piece.
Kollwitz was also an eloquent advocate for victims of social injustice, war, and inhumanity, she would often use her art work to spread awareness for these victims. A lot of the work I have shown by Kollwitz in my gallery portrays women and their children looking distressed, perhaps these pieces of art work are personal towards Kollwitz- she could be showing the audience what she was exposed to as a child, or what she had seen during her childhood.
Overall I really like Kollwitz's art work, her style is unique and I've never seen any other art work with such a gritty, dark style. It makes her art work stand out from the rest of the work from the expressionism era, a lot of the work from this era used vivid colours and oil paints, unlike Kollwitz.