Norbert Tadeusz

Norbert Tadeusz (* 19 February 1940 in Dortmund; † 11 July 2011 in Düsseldorf) was a well-known German painter of post-war representational art.

Education Norbert Tadeusz

Norbert Tadeusz began studying free painting in 1960 at the Werkkunstschule Dortmund with Gustav Deppe. He stayed there for a year before transferring to the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf to study with Gerhard Hoehme, Joseph Fassbender, and Joseph Beuys. In 1965 Tadeusz became a master student of Joseph Beuys. After his studies, Norbert Tadeusz worked as a freelance artist.

In 1971, he was awarded the Förderpreis des Kulturkreises im Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie. Two years later he received a lectureship at the State Academy of Art in Düsseldorf in the Münster department (now the Münster Academy of Art). This position changed from 1981 to 1988 into a professorship at the Art Academy in the Department of Art Education.

In 1982 Norbert Tadeusz takes part in the 40th Venice Biennale. Supported by the Villa Romana Prize, the artist stays in Florence in 1983. The prize, which was donated by Max Klinger and included an artist’s residence in the Villa Romana, is considered the oldest art prize still awarded in Germany.

From 1987 to 1988 he was a visiting professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, and from 1988 to 1991 a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. The Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig appointed the artist professor of monumental sculpture in 1991.

He is honoured with a retrospective at the Museum Ostwall in Dortmund, the city of his birth. This took place on the occasion of his 60th birthday in 2001. Characteristic of Norbert Tadeusz are his large-format paintings, which always depict the representational with their powerful use of colour. Norbert Tadeusz died on 11 July 2011 in Düsseldorf.

Bodies in the work of Norbert Tadeusz

Immediately after his studies, Norbert Tadeusz developed an antipathy to the prevailing tendency towards abstraction in the 1960s and opted for figurative representations. He remains true to his motifs and is intensively concerned with the human body, especially the female nude. He often depicts them in confused perspectives and postures.

The tense relationship between body and space is the leitmotif of his art, which is also clearly evident in his horse and landscape motifs, for example. By skillfully setting contrasts, Tadeusz was able to turn almost any motif into a sensation. He knew how to use painting in such a way that the viewer was stimulated to think even by the most mundane pictorial objects.

Norbert Tadeusz strongly advocated the founding of the Museum Island Hombroich, where a pavilion is dedicated to him today. The Tadeusz Pavilion was built in 1992 specifically to present his monumental paintings.