page_title: Irma Hünerfauth
section_title: Painting
hierarchical_section_title: Irma Hünerfauth / Career / Painting
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Sprechendes Objekt von I. Hünerfauth: Rockers Tod, 1989
context_page_description: Irma Hünerfauth, also known as "IRMAnipulations" was a German painter, sculptor and object artist who turned junkyard scrap into sculptures, machines and kinetic art objects that mocked consumer society. She opposed traditional academic art, rebelled against academism and followed radical contemporary art trends in post-war Germany. Through her work she is related with the concept of artists from the post-war modernity as well as the Nouveau Réalisme group of artists, such as Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Arman as well as Daniel Spoerri.
context_section_description: Hünerfauth's artistic career began as a painter. At first she was taught in the craft of painting during a solid traditional academic training under the professors Jank and Hess at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich. Thus at first, Hünerfauth painted figurative landscapes (e.g., Isartalbahnhof, 1938) and portraits, mostly from her familial environment (e.g., Familie Hünerfauth, 1946) and if she had followed that norm, she would have become a respectable painter of the post-impressionism style. But indeed, even the paintings of her early period featured their own signature style. Occasionally, expressionistic elements can be found, for example the wildly moved landscape forms in the painting "Pupplinger Au" (1950) or "Mother and Son" (1952), which show strong emotional movement and deepness. The first mentioned owes much to Edvard Munch "The Scream" (1892).
  From 1954, under the influence of Conrad Westpfahl, she began painting abstractly. One of her last paintings, Winter in Gries (1958), forgoes perspective entirely and conventionalizes the buildings to abstract areas. Now, she wanted to remove all the decorative art elements completely. Her paintings of the following years can be described as consequent as well as radical. She "attempts to bring the inventive impulse to an inner equilibrium by supporting it with a meditative character. Together the severity of the order and the softness of the whole gain the dramatic power of a dialogue. The dialogue lends movement and a facetting to the surface which seems haunted by a kind of dream". On the other hand, strong emotions are expressed abstractly, with a chaotic mixup of brushstrokes, an excessive frenzy of colors, vigorous and in a rough-textured style, as in her mixed media composition Untitled (1963). Occasionally her mostly large-sized paintings owe much to abstract Expressionism and the pioneers of Action painting, such as Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler. Her work is sometimes playful, as in the painting "16.1.1963" (1963), and sometimes experimental as in the painting The red Infamy (1966), in which she fixated metal wires through the canvas similar to a collage. Her abstract painting unites emotional expressiveness with graphic rigor.
  In 1969, she painted the "letzte Bild" (last picture – 1969/1989). It features a painted perforated metal plate on which emotional impulses run riot as if they were driven by electronic force. In the right corner, one can spot a drain plug with a chain simply fixated on canvas, a find, a piece of scrap that profanely ironizes the whole utopian and playfully futuristic portrayal, just like the subject that seems to be placed somewhere between space and earth. She expresses herself on the canvas playfully, headstrong, sometimes curious but also visionary. However, it seems that even the surface of a large canvas has become too small, as a suitable playing field of her present intentions. She had already built her first sculptural objects and she seemed to concentrate on one form of expression, eventually it should be working in the three-dimensional form. After "letzte Bild" she unexpectedly stopped painting and left only a relatively small oeuvre of pictures (Wilhelm Schäfer counts only 45 paintings which remained in the artist's estate, excluding watercolors and drawings). The turning away from painting marked the end of the sixties and was symptomatically for lots of other contemporary artists, too. Hünerfauth wanted to experiment, just as artists like her did it at that time.
  She partly returned to figurative painting, for example in sketches of her three-dimensional work and also later as she painted the picture "Mutter auf dem Weg zur Urmutter" (Mother becomes primordial mother, 1981).
caption: The death of the biker, 1989. Speaking object/ Installation
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