ABOUT SCHAUER
Otto Schauer was born on September 7, 1923 in Stuttgart. As a teenager, his passion for painting and his desire to be a painter encountered opposition from his family background. It was with Anton Kolig, an Austrian painter from the Secession movement (Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, etc.) who settled in Stuttgart, that he found teaching and encouragement.
Mobilized in 1943, wounded on the Russian front, then sent to Italy, it was not until 1945, back in Germany, that he was able to resume painting, notably with Willi Baumeister. Some beautiful abstract paintings bear witness to this period. But Schauer realizes that he needs something other than what he finds with Baumeister and his entourage; he wants to detach himself from abstraction, at the very moment when it triumphs in galleries and on the market; Baumeister himself encourages him to leave for Paris.
Then opens for him a difficult period of radical questioning: “I first wanted to create my own platform, to isolate myself”. This "platform" is both a thought of painting, a poetics, and an elaboration of its technique, which will never stop evolving and deepening.
It is the development of a new figuration based on color, rather than line and contour.
Perhaps the starting point of his path is to be found in the emotion felt at a very young age in front of a canvas seen at the Stuttgart Museum: a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, a painter then very underestimated. “It was a great discovery. I understood for the first time that with a tree in the landscape, you can say something other than that tree…”. And when his interlocutor asks him what this “other thing” is, he replies: “I never found it. That's why I paint. »
In Paris, which will become his home port, he will meet Fernand Léger, Jean Hélion, Balthus, Giacometti, and the friendship of Georges Limbour, André du Bouchet, Michel Leiris, Paul and Gisèle Celan.
Otto Schauer died on March 5, 1985 in Paris.