Auferstanden aus Ruinen | Der Maler Walter Mamat (1912-1976)
In the organizer's words:
From Memel to Wittenberg
In this exhibition, we are presenting works by the East Prussian artist Walter Mamat, whose oeuvre was created in East Prussia before 1945 and later in the GDR.
We know little about his time in East Prussia: Walter Mamat was born in Memel in 1912, the son of a bricklayer and a seamstress. After training as a decorative painter, he took private lessons with the artist Carl Knauf in Nidden from 1933. According to his own account, he was also an assistant to Carl Knauf from 1937 to 1940.
After fleeing to the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ), Walter Mamat studied at the University of Architecture and Fine Arts in Weimar from 1946 to 1948. There he was a master student of professors Hans van Breek, Otto Herbig and Herrmann Kirchberger. One year after his studies, the Hennig Gallery in Halle/Saale exhibited more than forty of his oil paintings, pastels and watercolors, directly after selected works by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff had been shown there.
From 1949, Walter Mamat was able to establish himself as an artist. He lived and worked freelance in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, where he also accepted commissions from state-owned enterprises (VEB) and painted entire walls, as this brought in more money; art was paid by surface area.
His commissioned works, rather schematic and almost bold, were subject to the style of Socialist Realism. In contrast, the paintings of the Curonian Spit, the impressions of his adopted home of Wittenberg and the artworks created on trips to Albania, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union show a much stronger artistic expression, more attention to detail and greater care. The heritage of East Prussian art is also evident in the colorful depiction of landscapes.
For the first time, the exhibition at the East Prussian State Museum offers an overview of all creative phases of the painter and graphic artist Walter Mamat. Some of the works of art presented here are on public display for the first time. Most of them are on loan from private collections.
This content has been machine translated.Location
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