Eugen Schönebeck: 1957 - 1967

Working simultaneously in abstraction and figuration, German painter Eugen Schönebeck features in his most famous works strange, mutated creatures that seem to oscillate between the worlds of the living and the dead. The first German artist to take up as a theme the horrors of World War II, Schönebeck is also well-known for his work in collaboration with Georg Baselitz and for the portraits he created in the mid-1960s of Soviet cultural heroes. And though he withdrew from the art world in 1966, his work remains as striking and powerful as ever.

 

Developed in collaboration with the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt—and to accompany exhibitions at the Bern Kunstmuseum, Vienna Kunsthalle, and Stiftung Moritzburg in Halle—this is the first volume to bring together all Schönebeck’s surviving canvases, along with forty of his works on paper. Rounding out the volume is an extensive biography based on personal conversations with the artist, establishing Schönebeck’s relation to social and political events in postwar Germany.