ANDREAS FELGER
Andreas Felger, born in 1935 in Mössingen-Belsen in Swabia, has been active for over six decades as a painter, woodcutter, sculptor and designer. He began his professional career in 1950 with an apprenticeship as a pattern draftsman at the company Pausa AG in Mössingen.
His skills and productivity as a draftsman predestined him for art studies, which he completed at the Academy of Arts in Munich from 1954 to 1958. Parallel to his work as a freelance textile designer for the Pausa AG (1960-80), Felger worked as a freelance artist from 1970, primarily creating woodcuts.
His landscapes, spiritual themes as well as pictorial transformations of musical and literary works are shown by the artist in a multitude of solo and group exhibitions from 1974 on. After 1980, Andreas Felger expanded his spectrum of artistic media with watercolour painting, in which his fascination with working with colour, form and structure finds diverse expression. Since 1985 until today, abstract compositions of large-scale oil painting are created.
His artistic work includes the conception and realization of book projects in collaboration with contemporary poets and writers, sculptures in public spaces, ensembles of objects, stained glass windows, furniture and pictorial works for interior design, and even walk-in wooden reliefs in the EXPO 2000 Church Pavilion in the Volkenroda Monastery (Thuringia), designed by Meinhard von Gerkan/GMP Architekten.
In 2002, the artist establishes the Andreas Felger Cultural Foundation for the documentation of his life long work as well as the promotion of contemporary visual art. In 2008, the foundation publishes a comprehensive monograph on Andreas Felger’s painting published by Wienand Verlag, Cologne.
In 2009 Felger moved from Gnadenthal in Hesse, where he had lived for 40 years in an ecumenically oriented community, back to his Swabian home in Mössingen, and in 2010 moves his studio into a former chapel in Bad Sebastiansweiler, which he calls Atelier K.
In 2012, the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz show a large exhibition of oil paintings by Andreas Felger titled Malen wie Atmen (Painting like Breathing) with an exhibition catalogue published in the Prestel Verlag, Munich.
In 2013, former Bundestag President Prof. Dr. Norbert Lammert publishes the book CREDO together with Andreas Felger. It is published by Adeo Verlag and combines texts on the Credo from two millennia with the 19-part oil painting cycle CREDO by Andreas Felger.
In 2015, the artist celebrates his 80th birthday, including the exhibitions WERK.STOFF in the Tonnenhalle in the Pausa-Quartier in Mössingen and MALEREI in the St. Matthäus Church at the Berlin Kulturforum.
In 2018 Andreas Felger awards for the first time the WERK.STOFF Prize for Painting, initiated by the Andreas Felger Cultural Foundation and the Heidelberger Kunstverein, to the artist Nadira Husain.
In 2018 and 2019, Stuttgart based organist and composer Sebastian Bartmann composes 19 organ works to accompany Andreas Felger’s oil painting cycle CREDO, which had its premiere in October 2019 at the Romanesque city church of St. Martin in Sindelfingen.
2021 in May, the Andreas Felger Cultural Foundation, in cooperation with the city of Mössingen and on the occasion of Andreas Felger’s 85th birthday, opens the retrospective exhibition LIFELINES. Andreas Felger’s sketches in the context of his art in the barrel hall of the former PAUSA AG in Mössingen.
In 2022, the Andreas Felger Cultural Foundation, together with Sebastian Bartmann and Prof. Dr. Norbert Lammert (former President of the German Bundestag), initiates the image-sound-word project CREDO, which combines the oil painting cycle, the organ works and the selected texts on the CREDO in an event that will be realized over several years starting in May 2021 in large church spaces, including St. Fidelis in Stuttgart, the EXPO 2000 Church Pavilion in Volkenroda Monastery, Speyer Cathedral and others.