(b Hamburg, 14 Nov 1929; d 31 Aug 1995). German draughtsman and printmaker. He studied from 1946 until 1951 with the painter and engraver Alfred Mahlau (b 1894) at the Staatliche Kunsthochschule in Hamburg, where he was offered a professorship but rejected it. In the latter half of the 1950s he first made woodcuts combining expressive and Surrealist elements and then turned to engraving. His work is too personal to be identified as part of a tendency. Dreams and fantasies, often with erotic imagery, predominate among his numerous drawings and engravings and are at once an expression of free forms and the personal anxieties of the artist. His major themes are landscape, still-lifes, portraits and, repeatedly, his own, often distorted, revealing face. He particularly enjoyed basing his work on foreign works of art, which the viewer is supposed to recognize; he did not copy but rather quoted. His encounter with Far Eastern art was important and resulted in Hokusai's Spaziergang (1972). A particular characteristic of his work is the literary additions within the work, from individual sentences to complete texts.

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