FRANK WOHLFAHRT 1942/2010

OIL ON CANVAS 116X89CM DATED 89

Frank was 17 when he entered the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg in 1959. He had already forged, as an autodidact, an artistic culture eyeing Gauguin, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Bonnard, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, whom he affectionately called Michelangelo (later Francis Bacon would be added).
In 1963, at the end of this first cycle of studies, Frank Wohlfhart left to do his military service in Algeria. On his return, he entered the National School of Fine Arts in Paris while attending the workshop of the painter-engraver Jean Delidech. From Fine Arts, he left in 1966 without a diploma. Ten years of personal construction and maturation of his painting followed.
Construction of his work: Frank Wohlfahrt uses all the means at his disposal to create tapestries, drawings, paintings, sets for a puppet theater, lacquerware, sculptures, paintings under glass, prints – in 1977 he created the association “L 'Estampe du Rhin' which brought together more than sixty engravers. He exhibited in France and abroad (Norway, Germany, Luxembourg) and built himself, first of all out of necessity, an ascetic art of life which he adopted until the end of his existence. Elevation will occur from 1983 in his third workshop, installed on his barge “Le chien caillou”, moored in the Petite France district of Strasbourg; it is punctuated by two important events in the painter's life, the obtaining of the Goethe Foundation Scholarship in 1985 and simultaneously, his appointment to the position of head of the painting workshop at the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts.

"His work is inscribed in a truth of emotion where painting is not an evocation but an invocation, like a form of metaphysical quest with this feeling "of having to make painting, something that is of order of Consolation »
Consolation of a world where saving art transcends the fury of Men by “calling things to exist, extracting them from nothingness in the space of the canvas”.
The work is guided by its subject, the painting of the human body and the compositions of figures.
To the movement of the bodies, the composition gives its measure, letting all the harmony of the colors burst forth, deploying on the canvas multiple lyrical, sensual and robust compositions, according to which bodies become entangled, in intimacy or tenderness, in the struggle or resignation, inherited from the principles drawn from the reading of Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting for which - the whole, is what represents to sight the union of all the parts of a body in the proportion which is specific to it, and the grace of the whole is born from the relationships and harmony of the movements. »

Disappeared in 2010, with the colorful fragrances of May roses, Frank Wohlfahrt, trained at the Decorative Arts in Strasbourg (where he was a professor) as well as at the Beaux-arts in Paris, worked to make his life a work, without never make concessions to the spirit of the times.

Ref: GHB679SUYQ