mad clown2017, 160 × 120 cm
Rainer Fetting, born 1949 in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Rainer Fetting was one of the co-founders and main protagonists of the Galerie am Moritzplatz in Berlin, founded in the late 1970s by a group of young artists (mainly painters) from the class of Karl Horst Hödicke at the former Berliner Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Berlin Art Academy, today known as Universität der Künste). This group of artists, known as the “Moritzboys” and including, among others, Salomé, Bernd Zimmer, and Helmut Middendorf, subsequently achieved international acclaim as the “Junge Wilde” or “Neue Wilde” in the early 1980s. Fetting is now one of the internationally best known contemporary German artists, having created a large oeuvre of expressive figurative paintings covering many different kinds of subject-matter, as well as many bronze sculptures.

Fetting has participated in numerous influential exhibitions, including a new spirit in painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, (1981), Zeitgeist at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, (1982), Von hier aus – Zwei Monate deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf at Messehallen Düsseldorf (1984), An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at the MoMA, New York, (1988), Refigured Painting – The German Image 1960–1988 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, (1989) and Portrait Now at the National Portrait Gallery, London, (1993). Recent highlights are Painting Forever! Keilrahmen at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2013) and permanent exhibition Sammlung Marx at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany (2016). In 2011, the museum Berlinische Galerie honored the artist with an extensive solo exhibition. His work is included in the collections of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for ContemporaryArt, Berlin; and The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles among many others.


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