ALTENKIRCH, OTTO1875 Ziesar - 1945 Siebenlehn


Title: "Zills Teich im Sonnenschein".
Date: 1922.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 55.5 x 68cm.
Notation: Signed lower right: "Otto Altenkirch".
Frame: Framed.
Verso:
On the stretcher numbered by the artist: 1922 27.ph / Otto Altenkirch. Dresden".

Literature:
M. Petrasch: Otto Altenkirch, 1875 - 1945. Leben und Werk. Dresden 2005, p. 260 no. 1922-27-S.

Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany;
Kunstsalon Emil Richter Dresden, December 1922.

Otto Altenkirch's works have been rediscovered by the public and the art market in recent years. His predominantly late Impressionist landscapes, which he painted in his native Brandenburg and Saxony, are timeless in their choice of motifs. Birch forests, shorelines, but also farmsteads and village views are still convincing today with their moods of light and finely applied colouring.

Cat. No. 1385 stands chronologically and stylistically singular next to the four other works shown here. This 'View of Ziesar Castle in the Evening Light' from 1901 clearly shows the influence that his professor, the important landscape painter Eugen Bracht, exerted on the 26-year-old student Altenkirch. The other paintings presented here, with their dissolved contours, were created between 1922 and 1944 and show the power of the self-confident artist, who used light and colour with aplomb and expressed himself in the best Impressionist tradition right up to his late work.

It is gratifying and appropriate that Otto Altenkirch's paintings, which for decades were increasingly received in the former GDR, are now being recognised by a broad, all-German public.