Dabbling in Art

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Vita

Irmela Witteberg was born in January 19, 1940 in Kapfenberg, Austria under the maiden name of Krentscher. Her family came from Ratibor in Poland. Around 1946 she settled in the Hessian city of Darmstadt, Germany. She could imagine to become an architect like her father and was highly interested in interior design as well as, conversely, bridge engineering. A year later, she tentatively visited the Werkkunstschule in Darmstadt, an art academy for aspiring designers.

One of her works during that time was a freely drawn ink sketch of Rigoletto, prominently exhibited in a gathering of young artists in the rotund of the Ludwigskirche. She also experimented with bold compositions in oil, drawn in heavy body consistency and conceptualised as ephemeral works. Remarkable in this regard was Der Mann in Rot [“Man in Red”], a cubist painting on a monochrome green ground, showing an upright bright red figure and a subdued cowering one with their backs to the viewer. In 1962, she was admitted to the Folkwang Universität der Künste, a renowned art university in Essen. However, she ultimately opted against pursuing an artistic career for economical reasons, instead taking over the family business of importing and exporting working clothes.

During her time as an entrepreneur from 1961 to 2011, Irmela Witteberg took to collecting works of art instead. Her focus lay on oriental antiquities, especially Chinese woodcarvings and furniture, but also included African masks and sculptures. These collectibles were soon to influence her own later works, with forced perspective and distortion playing a major role. From 2011 onwards she explored vector-based digital art as an expressive medium and gave attention to artworks of her own again.

Perfectly geometrical computerized linework, the possibilty to rearrange finished works and millions of colours at her disposal without the need to mix them herself proved to be a fount for creativity. And so, in October 2015 she exhibited two digital fine art prints in the City-Galerie of Bremen, an exhibition with the thoroughly regional motto of celebrating native artists such as Bernward Hoetger and Gerhard Marcks. One of her images even depicte the Bremer Stadtmusikanten (Town Musicians of Bremen). But at the same time, a profound weakness took hold of her, hindering her from the pursuit of further publication plans. When she quietly passed away on February, 5th 2017 in Bremen. she left a heritage of around 300 designs as digital files and some pencil drawings.