Karl Fred Dahmen

Karl Fred Dahmen (Stolberg 1917–1981 Preinersdorf in Chiemgau) is considered one of the most important representatives of German Abstraction. His works are represented in collections of renowned museums in Germany and all over the world.

Dahmen’s successful and internationally acclaimed artistic career ended far too early – the artist died at the age of sixty-three in Preinersdorf in Chiemgau/Upper Bavaria as a result of a brain tumour.

In 2003, Thomas Weber compiled the two-volume catalogue raisonné, which presents 1,637 works in his artistic career of nearly 35 years. After the last large museum retrospective in the Moderne Galerie of the Saarlandmuseum in Saarbrücken in 1985, his artistic work was honoured in 2017/18 on the occasion of his 100th birthday by two museums in Duisburg and Düren.

Although Dahmen’s early work is strongly associated with the concept of German Informel, the exhibition at the MKM Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg, clearly demonstrated that, following the so-called ‘terrestrial period’, the artist also created a remarkable oeuvre in the Chiemgau region in the 1960s and ’70s, which is just as exciting in terms of singularity and independence.

The Informel works of the Stolberg period reveal the influence of the open-cast mining landscape of his native Stolberg. The dark-toned and relief-like paintings as well as the material collages are reminiscent of the damage to the local landscape caused by open-cast mining. Dahmen was an artist who was always preoccupied with what could be seen directly around him. In a very authentic way, he transformed what he saw in the “real” into abstract painting. ‘I don't paint landscapes, I make them’, was his motto.
In 1967, K. F Dahmen was appointed Professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and moved to the Chiemgau region. This change of location had an elementary influence on his artistic work. Pictures and collages made of his surroundings and assemblage boxes were created, which dealt with the landscape he encountered. The materials on his old farm and the impressions in his everyday working life, were his inspiration. Like his artistic peers were doing in “nouveau réalisme” in Europe and POP-art in America Dahmen sought to reconnect art with real life.
It is precisely the assemblage boxes created up to 1975 that reveal his the tension between the real and the artistic abstraction of this reality. Here we see the expressionist and the realist coming together.

In the last period, before his death in 1981, the poetic form took the lead. Delicate traces and colour, mostly seen and described as painterly sound, as music, are composed in subtle creations. This is even more sensible in his “soundproof” works on paper, pure poetry, pure silence. The monochrome surface seemingly touched by the feather of an angel, to leave us behind with traces of an artistic genius. In these works the perfect balance is found, nothing has to be add, nothing has to be erased. The sound of silence.