Composition pour les JO, 1992

Helmut Middendorf  

Helmut Middendorf is a German artist born on January 28, 1953 in Dinklage.

From 1973 to 1979, he studied at the Berlin School of Art with professor Karl Horst Hödicke, one of the fathers of neo-Expressionism in Berlin. Under the influence of Hödicke, Middendorf started at the end of the seventies making material creations of an ostensibly picturesque style.
Together with the other pupils of Hödicke (Rainer Fetting, Salomé and Bernd Zimmer) he participated in 1977 in the founding of the Moritzplatz Gallery in Berlin, which showed films, photos and performances in addition to painting, drawings and the art of objects.
In 1979, Middendorf received an educational mission for an experimental film at the Grande Ecole des Arts in Berlin. He was already very interested in cinema besides painting during his studies.

Middendorf belongs to the "Nouveaux Fauves" movement such as painters:Jirí Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting, Salomé and Elvira Bach, a group of artists who developed a violent and Hedonistic painting in the early 80s in Germany and Austria.

Thanks to a scholarship he obtained from the German academy of exchange, Middendorf left to New York in 1980. A more emotional serenity characterizes his work at that time. By the reduction of color and his choice of new subjects, he finds the way towards more frankness in its experimental art. By the end of the 80s appear his black images with which he seeks to reflect his own life and his position as an artist, which he sees as a sign for a new beginning.

In 2003/2004 he exposed his work in the exhibition "Obsessive Malerei" a retrospective on new fauves present at the center for art and media technology in Karlsruhe. His works are also visible in the Cartier Foundation's public collection of contemporary art.