Hans Vent

From the late 1950s to the 2010s, Hans Vent stayed true to figuration, though his colorful, dysmorphic, often corpulent bodies differ greatly from those of his realist contemporaries. Captivated by the relationship between man and nature, his works focus on a restricted set of motifs: the beach, the nude, and the head. Vent (1934 in Weimar – 2018 in Berlin) first learned art from his father, the landscape painter Rudolf Vent. From 1948-50, he undertook an apprenticeship in building painting and ornamentation, pursued further education in the field for three more years, and then studied at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee under Toni Mau, Kurt Robbel, Bert Heller, and Gabriele Mucchi (1953-58), joining the GDR’s Verband der Bildenden Künstler (Association of Visual Artists or VBK) upon graduation.

In the 1960s, Vent received a number of mural and public art commissions for new apartment blocks, a number of restaurants, and a Berlin market hall. Involvement in these large-scale building projects ensured his ascension to the highest rank of GDR artists. Due to his many accomplishments, like serving on the artistic planning committee for the Palast der Republik (1973-75) and winning the Käthe Kollwitz Prize (1982), his name appears countless times in state-controlled media outlets, like Neues Deutschland, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the latter decade, Vent also travelled to and exhibited work in West Germany, France, and Italy, including the 43rd Venice Biennale (1988).

Vent’s biography is marked by felicitous timing: he dodged the formalist debates of the early 1960s by concentrating on building works, chose to hunker-down on oil-painting and distort the body in the 1970s, at a time when his style would no longer offend the regime, and lastly, made himself visible to western audiences just before the state’s demise.

text: Tobias Rosen