Moeller Fine Art Berlin is pleased to announce “Paul Goesch: Fantastical Reveries”, to take place from 19 November 2010 to 29 January 2011, with an opening reception Thursday, 18 November at 7pm. Twenty five watercolors executed between the 1910s and 1920s will be on view, including images of fantastical architecture, mask-like portraits, and religious / historical scenes.
That tragic and insular life of Paul Goesch is not at odds with his extraordinary imagination and technical ability. Born in Schwerin in 1885, Goesch was trained as an artist in Munich and an architect in Berlin. He worked in both professions before psychological instabilities prevented him from continuing and living on his own. Beginning in 1917, Goesch was admitted to a number of psychiatric clinics which granted him varying degrees of freedom to create art, which was usually fantastical or religious in nature. These minutely rendered images attest to many hours of diligent work, as well as a seemingly infinite mental stock of architectural and loosely historical imagery. In the 1920s, Goesch was a member of the artists’ associations “Die Gläserne Kette“ (The Glass Chain) and “Novembergruppe” (The November Group), alongside Lyonel Feininger, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius, as well as the “Arbeitsrat für Kunst” (Workers council for art). Goesch’s work was abruptly halted in 1934, when he was sent to the Psychiatric Hospital of Brandenburg at Teupitz where the Nazis inflicted forced labor on the artist. He was euthanized in 1940.
The extraordinary quality of Goesch's art, inspite of his psychiatric problems, has brought him acclaim as an outsider artist. Many of the artist’s works are included in the collection of psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn now maintained at the University of Heidelberg. His works are also part of the collections of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur in Berlin, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Centre Canadien d’Architecture in Montréal.
The gallery would like to thank the Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur for the loan of the works by Paul Goesch and for their help in providing information about his life.
