Background
Rainer Fetting was born on December 31, 1949 in Wilhelmshaven, Germany.
Rainer Fetting was born on December 31, 1949 in Wilhelmshaven, Germany.
Fetting first completed studies as a carpenter, and then moved to Berlin, Germany. He studied painting at the Hochschule der Künste (the Academy of Fine Arts) in Berlin from 1972 to 1978 with professor Hans Jaenisch.
After having been trained as a carpenter and a stage designer at the Landesbühne Niedersachsen Nord in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, Rainer Fetting moved to Berlin.
He was one of the co-founders and main protagonists of the Galerie am Moritzplatz in Berlin, founded in 1977 as a self-help project, in order to be able to exhibit their colorful figurative paintings in an art scene still dominated by minimalism, conceptual art, as well as Berlin Realism. Fetting at the time focused on Berlin cityscape, portraits and figurative work ("Van Gogh At The Wall"), painted in strong colors, and including many depictions of the Berlin Wall. In 1980 he participated in the exhibition "Heftige Malerei“ in the Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, in 1981 he was part of the exhibition New Spirit in Painting organized by Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and in 1982 he participated in the exhibition “Zeitgeist” in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin.
After that he had many solo exhibitions in reputable galleries both in Europe and in the United States, such as Bruno Bischofberger, Mary Boone, Yvon Lambert, Daniel Templon, the Marlborough Gallery, New York, or Anthony d'Offay. In early 1983, the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux presented an exhibition of collaborative works by Luciano Castelli, Fetting, and Salomé.
In 1984 he participated in the exhibitions "Von hier aus - Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst" in Düsseldorf and "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture" at the MoMA, New York, in 1988 he was part of the exhibition "Refigured Painting - The German Image 1960-1988" at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Between 1983 and 1994 he lived in New York and Berlin.
In his paintings Fetting continued to explore the topic of the cityscape. Starting in 1984, while in New York, he experimented with assemblages of drift wood set on canvas and painted over. In 1986, he also started doing bronze sculptures. In 1996 Fetting created the Willy Brandt sculpture for Willy Brandt House, Berlin, Germany.
In 2003-2004 he was included in the exhibition "Obsessive Malerei - Ein Rückblick auf die Neuen Wilden".
Besides, he created the portrait sculpture of Henri Nannen for the Henri Nannen Press Award in 2005, and in 2006 - 7 sculptures of Helmut Schmidt.
Recent highlights were the solo shows “Return of the Giants. Rainer Fetting Sculptures” (2008) and "Mancapes" (2010) at Gerhard-Marcks-Haus in Bremen and at Kunsthalle Tübingen.
Rainer Fetting currently lives and works between Berlin, Germany and New York, United States.
Rainer 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.
In 1978 Fetting received the DAAD Scholarship for residence in New York, United States, and spent there a year.
His best known work is the 3,40-meters-high sculpture of former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, placed in the foyer of the SPD party headquarters in Berlin, Germany. Besides, in 2011 the museum Berlinische Galerie honored the artist Rainer Fetting with an extensive solo exhibition.
Moreover, Fetting’s works are held in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main, and the Belinische Galerie, among others.
He was a member of the "Junge Wilde", or "Wild Youth", group during the 1980s, which included Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger.
