01 Work, The Art Of The Nude, with footnotes # 72

Werner Berges, (1941-2017)

Mirror picture, c. 1975

Color etching with aquatint on wove paper

32 x 39.5 cm

Private collection

"For me, a beautiful woman is still the most perfect that I can imagine: the ideal object of art."  Berges

Werner Berges (born December 7, 1941 in Cloppenburg , † October 26, 2017 in Schallstadt) was a German Pop Art artist. For a number of contemporary critics Berges matured very early to one of the most important representatives of Pop Art in Germany.

From 1960 to 1963 he studied commercial art at the Kunstschule Bremen with a focus on fashion design. From 1962 Berges created a series of abstract works that suggest the American Cy Twombly as a source of inspiration. Berges was interested in Twombly's work early on, but he declined to speak of direct influence.

From 1963 to 1968 he studied painting at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin. In 1965 Berges slowly turned to figurative painting. Works from this period show anthropomorphic figures, which are distributed on the canvas and at first glance are often not recognizable as such.

In 1967 Berges found his main theme: the woman. No other motif fascinated him as much as the female body: "For me, a beautiful woman is still the most perfect that I can imagine: the ideal object of art."  Berges presented the type of woman known from advertising but he removed the ad figure from its context and presented it to the viewer in a whole new light. 

Berges freed women from their advertising context and placed them in a completely new visual context. He reduced the female body to simple shapes and combined them with different patterns, such as circles, flat color stripes, or replaced the body line with loose contour points. With a few exceptions, Berges' women were not famous personalities.

The artist did not only make pictures, but also sculptures . In particular, his motif "Lots of people" is in different variants in the public space of several cities.

He died in October 2017 at the age of 75. Berges' artistic estate is curated by his daughter Amalia Berges. More on Werner Berges

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