Michael Heckert (born 29 October 1950, in

Halle an der Saale Halle (Saale), or simply Halle (), is the second largest city of the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. It is the sixth-most populous city in the area of former East Germany after (East) Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz and Magdeburg as well as t ...

) is a contemporary German painter. Heckert dedicates himself to

abstract expressionism Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depressi ...

. The artist depicts and describes the phenomenon of the female. He was influenced by

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...

painter

Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning ( , ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. Born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1926, becoming a US citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married pa ...

Life

Heckert grew up in Ostwestfalen, Germany. He has lived and maintained his studio in a small village near Griefswald in

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (MV; ; ), also known by its Anglicisation, anglicized name Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania, is a Federated state, state in the north-east of Germany. Of the country's States of Germany, sixteen states, Mecklenburg-Vorpom ...

since 2018. In early childhood Heckert displayed an unusual artistic talent for painting, and he determined to become a painter. His parents judged his passion as “breadless art” and forced him to complete an apprenticeship as a wholesale and foreign trade merchandiser in order to support financially his parental household (out of 96,- German Marks net wage during the first year as an apprentice he had to deliver at home 80,- German Marks ). After 11 years of little success in this occupation he managed – in spite of only having studied up to the compulsory school level – to study arts in the SHFBK Braunschweig and graduated with outstanding achievements.

Artistic career

Heckert's first exhibition was in 1982 in Cologne, in the Heinz Holtmann Gallery, and was considered successful. His longing for illimitability in expression led 1984 to a change of style in his paintings: he turned away from the half figurative paintings and sought to materialise his mode of expression in abstract painting. Despite the strong influence of de Kooning, he developed his own form for his artistic contents: The female. At the beginning of 2007 Heckert moved to Port-au-Prince, where he encountered new impressions and challenges. The local art which predominantly deals with Voodoo and the everyday life of the Haitian people inspires increasingly his oeuvre.

References

External links

*
Michael Heckert
on the

Union List of Artist Names The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) is a free online database of the Getty Research Institute using a controlled vocabulary, which by 2018 contained over 300,000 artists and over 720,000 names for them, as well as other information about artist ...

The academy of arts: HBK BraunschweigMuseum Ludwig, CologneDeutsche Bank ArtThe museum of the university of Marburg
{{DEFAULTSORT:Heckert, Michael 1950 births Living people 20th-century German painters 20th-century German male artists German male painters 21st-century German painters 21st-century German male artists