Schwarz, Lieselotte

Painter, draughtswoman, poet

Born: 06.10.1930 in Liegnitz (Silesia)

died: 12.06.2003 in Wiesbaden

After fleeing Silesia, Schwarz was orphaned and found asylum in Flensburg in 1946. From then on, she felt that her life was a threatened existence, which is reflected in her artistic work. From 1949-52, she studied at the Master School of Fashion in Hamburg and at the State Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1956, she made her successful debut as a freelance children's book author. The first of her Leporellos was repeatedly published and distributed in licensed editions and won awards. The same applies to her picture books, for some of which she also wrote the texts. For example, "Der Traummacher" (1972) and five other titles were awarded the title "One of the fifty (most beautiful) books of the Federal Republic of Germany". Schwarz lived and worked in Wiesbaden from 1968.

In 1969, she was awarded a scholarship from the Villa Massimo in Rome. The artist concentrated on a manageable repertoire of everyday realities, which are not what they seem, whether it is a man and a woman, whether it concerns the multi-layered motif of the house, whether it is about the pictorial words heart, star, moon or very elementary subjects: in her imaginative picture poems, which sometimes expand into stories, these ciphers can switch back and forth between fever dreams, nightmares and wishful dreams. Strictly two-dimensional, without perspective and abandoning real proportions, the simultaneity familiar from fairy tales prevails in her incredibly dense pictorial poetry. In a relentlessly disciplined creative process, she captured the unpredictable, uncontrolled and magical in a clearly defined form. This gave rise to her characteristic tension of essential richness and stringent composition.

She was a master of the art of watercolor, and its quality of the definitively ephemeral made her vibrate. She painted against the fragile and endangered with defiant hope in order to encode her traumatic past.

She found her final resting place in the North Cemetery.