Karl-Heinz Herrfurth, born in 1934 in Berlin-Dahlem, studied Fine Arts and Art Education at the Berlin University of the Arts (HfBK) from 1954 to 1960 under Professors Gerhard Fietz, Ludwig Gabriel Schrieber, Helmut Thoma, and Curt Lahs. His collaboration with Lahs, in particular, influenced Herrfurth's later work as an art teacher. He deeply regretted his teacher's sudden death in 1958. In 1960, he completed his studies at the HfBK Berlin with the First State Examination in Fine Arts, Art Education, Painting, Education, and Philosophy, and also finished his studies in typography under Professor Hölter. He was also named a master student of Professor Fietz. His fellow students at the HfbK during this time included Ulrich Baehr, Peter Berndt, Hans-Georg Dornhege, Matthias Koeppel, Dieter Kraemer, Ernst Marow, and his friend Reiner Strub. From 1963 to 1974, he worked as a technical draftsman, research assistant, artistic assistant, and lecturer at the Chair of Free Drawing and Painting at the Technical University (TU) Berlin. His first solo exhibition took place in Berlin in 1966. In 1967, Herrfurth received the Wolfsburg Art Prize, "Young City Sees Young Art." In 1974, he was appointed professor at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), the same year as Karl-Horst Hödicke—at a time when painting, as a consequence of the protests of the 1960s, was still considered by some students to be capitalist, reactionary, and therefore outdated. Herrfurth mediated in conflicts between students and the university and clearly championed the position of painting and drawing against other approaches. He held his professorship there until 2002. His faculty included many internationally renowned artists from across various departments, such as Dieter Appelt, Frank Badur, Georg Baselitz, Hans-Jürgen Diehl, Klaus Fußmann, Werner Gailis, Johannes Gecelli, Kuno Gonschior, Dieter Hacker, Burkhard Held, Rebecca Horn, Leiko Ikemura, Herbert Kaufmann, Heinz-Jürgen Kristahn, Dietmar Lemcke, Kassab-Bacchi Marwan, Christiane Möbus, Wolfgang Petrick, Joachim Schmettau, Michael Schoenholtz, Katharina Sieverding, Volker Stelzmann, Hann Trier, Heinz Trökes, and Jürgen Verhoeven. During the preparatory phase for the founding of the Berlin University of the Arts (HdK Berlin), Herrfurth was a member of the structural commission. After the university's founding, he became a member of the Academic Senate and served as Vice President of the HdK Berlin from 1992 to 1994. During his time as a professor, he was a member of both the Karl Hofer Society and the German Artists' Association, where he regularly participated in exhibitions in various cities. Numerous exhibitions and participations document Karl-Heinz Herrfurth's continuous activity as an artist during his approximately thirty years as a lecturer, in which he trained generations of students, including Horst Beese, Sonja Blattner, Carola Czempik, Wolfgang Ebert, Anna Holldorf, Manfred Fischer, Peter Freitag, Blonay Fuchs, Karl-Ludwig Lange, Ulrike Lösing, Michael Luther, Susanne Nothdurft, Liese Petry, Katharina Poos, Axel Sander, and Sigrid Weise, who contributed to the improvement of this website with their suggestions, recollections, and critiques. Our special thanks go to Anna Holldorf, who initiated the idea and designed it. As a cosmopolitan young artist, Herrfurth was drawn to distant lands from an early age: as early as the late 1950s, at just 25 years old, he traveled to Morocco, Spain, and Greece. In Greece, he met his wife, Ourania Mantouvalou, in 1960, whom he married in Athens in 1962. The couple had three sons. Since then, Karl-Heinz Herrfurth lived and worked in both Berlin and the Mani region (southern Peloponnese, Greece). His engagement with other cultures, history, literature, archaeology, and philosophy consistently enriched his artistic work. An entry in his notebook dated September 8, 1965, reads: "Before my 31st birthday, which is to be a turning point in my life. Greece, the land of promise, borders, the place of encounter. A day on which I feel like an artist, the artist I might one day become. Program: Renewal of art as a unique celebration of the moment. [...] The artist is the person who, in the search for pictorial truth, dares everything." Throughout his career, Karl-Heinz Herrfurth was in search of pictorial truth and dared everything in art. While his early works were more devoted to painting, in the following years he increasingly focused on drawing as well. Regarding Herrfurth, as well as the aforementioned members of the faculty who had studied at the HfBK (University of Fine Arts Berlin), it has rightly been asserted that "a system of artistic positions developed at the university, particularly in the field of painting, which, based on its own experience, directly referenced the artistic tradition of the UdK around 1960 and consciously developed or deliberately altered it. Thus, since the 1970s, a focus on figurative expressive painting emerged, which developed partly as a direct reaction against, and partly as an expansion towards, a connection between art and the real world from the abstract, non-representational, informal, and Tachist painting of their teachers Hann Trier and Fred Thieler, which was perceived as too noncommittal" (Guido Fassbender, catalogue for the exhibition "UdK Berlin", Berlin 2005, p. 14). After his studies, Herrfurth thus experienced a "long phase of work oriented towards realism, focusing on figurative paintings until around 1978," as the artist describes it in a short biography. In the 1960s and 70s, the realist Herrfurth also emerged as a representative of critical realism (sometimes with reminiscences of Pop Art), an art movement that reached its peak in Europe and the USA during this period. The term "critical realism" generally refers to that realistic art form which, purely stylistically, is usually close to Pop Art or photorealism and which bases its subject matter on socio-critical considerations. Thus, Karl-Heinz Herrfurth can be described as a product of his time, as he used the prevailing stylistic devices of realism to translate critical content into his oil paintings and photo collages. During this phase, Herrfurth represented a modern figurative style that was often surreal, socially critical, and photorealistic, which manifested itself in his stylistic interpenetration, blending, and juxtaposition of humanity and technology. Perspective, often like that of a camera lens, the subject is magnified in a cropped way, thereby both focusing it and deliberately distorting it. The critical aspect of the paintings from this period is less often directly political (cf. Herrfurth's war paintings), but rather manifests itself in the engagement with social issues such as technological advancements, the use of consumer goods (cf. early oil paintings of the "Car Series"), advertising, clichés, the treatment of animals, food, etc. This challenges the viewer of these works to reflect on their own stance in these areas, which lends the paintings a high degree of relevance even 50 years later. Herrfurth's critical attitude towards the increasing technologization of human life can be understood, on the one hand, as a reaction to the social changes of his time; on the other hand, his more than ten years of work as a technical draftsman may also have contributed to his preference for depicting technical subjects in his paintings of the 1960s and 70s. It is worth mentioning that the artist has translated some of his numerous photo collages almost exactly into large photorealistic oil paintings. Correspondence from 1963 reveals that Herrfurth stumbled upon collage by chance during a creative crisis, drawn to the appealing material and "because it allows one to discover new color combinations, as a means of liberation." He viewed his collage examples, as he called them, not so much as small pictures, but rather as stages within a process. The collages also served as drafts for his larger works (see the folders "Templates/Oil Paintings" or "Photo Collages"). Technically, the artist proceeded by meticulously cutting out suitable motifs from illustrated magazines and assembling them by gluing them onto cardboard. As a note indicates, he produced approximately 1,000 (!) such photo collages between 1967 and 1976, of which about 400 were captured by the artist as photographs on slides. He translated approximately 100 into oil paintings, while most of the original collages have not survived. Other templates for large oil paintings, however, he created in a more traditional way, using small-format drawings, watercolors, or, less frequently, photographs. Over time, Herrfurth repeatedly drew inspiration from the "Old Masters" of classical, representational, and also abstract painting, whose models and influence he also addressed in his seminars. His oeuvre therefore encompasses a large number of works, primarily clearly representational, but also some more abstract pieces. However, it is rare to find mere play with colors without any suggestion of form. His work at the university encouraged the artist to constantly formulate his ideas theoretically and practically in his painting, which, along with his inherent curiosity, is certainly an important reason for the diversity of his paintings and motifs. Despite all the variation, there is a central theme that has been evident in his works for over five decades: the human body and its parts, especially the head and hand, which, from an anthropological and evolutionary perspective, are considered the most prominent parts of the human body. After a phase of intensive drawing and watercoloring of realistic and surrealist subjects... From around 1978 to 1982, in which he created "large-format still lifes based on extensive studies of nature" (quote from the artist), he adopted a completely new style in his painting from about 1982 onwards, which is evident, for example, in the folders "Large Formats on Paper" or "Homage to Bacon": "Development of figurations with an experimental character in the free painting process" (quote from Herrfurth). This was not, however, to switch to a new style, but rather to further pursue his own path in painting. For Herrfurth, the work of Francis Bacon served more as a springboard: Engaging with Bacon's expression and with other modern artists allowed him to forge his own path, discover new facets of color, and be even more himself. In the following years, Karl-Heinz Herrfurth increasingly turned to small-format works on paper, particularly from 1985 to 2000. Drawings/mixed media on old paper surfaces (see the folders "Series" and "Works on Old Paper Surfaces"), which he had discovered in Greece, his second home alongside Berlin (see the folder "Elias"), and later also purchased from antique dealers. In these works, Herrfurth extensively explored the fascinating interplay of historical painting surfaces (cash books, letters, envelopes, school notebooks, inventory books, autograph albums, and forms) and the interplay of form and color, which enter into an interesting dialogue with the paper and its historically determined function. A key aspect is the human being's place within the world, within their environment, their continuum. In these and other works, a frequently symbolic-philosophical character emerges, linking past and present, reality and imagination into an imaginative and new whole. On the other hand, Herrfurth continues down paths he has already forged, as evidenced by the large-format oil paintings of the The 1960s to 1980s primarily focused on humanity within a mostly technical, economic, or artificial environment. However, in the 1980s, forms and colors, formats, and surfaces varied more significantly. Herrfurth's work was also strongly influenced by his time in Greece, on the volcanic island of Milos and especially in the rocky Mani region of the Peloponnese. Since the 1970s, symbolic motifs such as tools, bodies, hands, heads, mountains, bucrania, vegetation, masks, fruits, and herms have been found in his art, some of which can be explained by his engagement with Greek culture, history, and landscape. Herrfurth himself explained his turn to drawing by the fact that, in the bright Greek sun, he sometimes couldn't use color as a means of expression due to the glaring sunlight and consequently had to rely on form and line. In addition to extensive studies of nature, his work in the Mani also provided him with numerous subjects such as landscapes, towers, and tools (see "Objects"). in space"), boats, mountains, or symbols (see the folders "Drawings," "In the Mani," or "Landscape"). In later years, Herrfurth no longer created his large oil paintings purely realistically (see "Oil on Canvas, 1987-2015"), and he also reduced his exclusive use of drawing. Instead, he painted extensively on small and large sheets of paper, using a wide variety of techniques as before, experimenting curiously with new forms, and reintroducing collage into his oeuvre, but this time not as photo collages as in the early 1960s, but in combination with his painting (see the folder "Collages"). When Herrfurth successfully passed his second state examination to become a teacher at the Herrmann-Ehlers-Gymnasium in Berlin in 1963, it was by no means certain that he would be able to make a living as an artist outside of the teaching profession. At that time, the art market in Berlin (and in Germany in general) was hardly developed: only a handful of galleries existed in West Berlin, and state funding for young artists was scarce. Artists had little opportunity to earn a living; very few sold their work. They took on odd jobs to make ends meet. Herrfurth did this as well, since few found positions in academia. His employment as a technical draftsman in 1963, and especially his professorship at the Berlin University of the Arts (HdK) in 1974, provided Herrfurth with a high degree of financial and social security. He greatly appreciated this, as it gave him ample time to dedicate to realizing his artistic ideas. At the same time, his involvement as a member of the advisory board of the "Youth in the Museum" association at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin-Dahlem during the 1970s demonstrates that the artist had not completely withdrawn from art education work with children. The absence of production stress, the pressure to compromise, or the need for sales allowed him absolute artistic freedom and, combined with family obligations as he grew older, also led to a greater withdrawal from public exhibitions. Herrfurth disliked self-promotion; artistic recognition was of no interest to him. He was rather modest in his approach to publishing his work. Instead, he spent most of his life exploring, investigating, and discovering his surroundings and himself through daily painting. He did this almost every day from morning until late afternoon, regardless of whether he was on vacation or painting at the university and later in his studio on Salzufer, where he had taken up residence next to his former colleague Dieter Appelt. Besides teaching, organizing, exams, administration, and other demands of daily university life, his days were filled with numerous conversations with colleagues and students, often over a cup of coffee. The HdK/UdK was and is a place where art was (and still is) a frequent topic of conversation and discussion. Herrfurth enjoyed reading while painting, listening to jazz or classical music, and replaying professional chess games. Indicative of his open nature and interest in the work of others is the fact that many former students of the HdK/UdK reported that they could always turn to Herrfurth for advice. if they weren't in his class. His door was always open (see Wolfgang Ebert, "Memories of Student Years at the HdK with Professor Herrfurth," under "Texts"). For years, he was available at the university every day, even on weekends, which often caused irritation within his family. Being free from financial constraints also allowed Herrfurth to incorporate his high level of technical skill into his work. This is evident in the clear lines of many pieces; the oil paintings usually lack thick overpainting, and even many watercolors demonstrate a precise handling of the brushstroke, pushing the boundaries of the medium and achieving only with great patience. Herrfurth's works not only show us that he was a technically perfect painter, but also that he succeeded as an artist in developing his own visual language, one that communicates something to the viewer and challenges them. As a Berliner, he formulated the following requirement for his students: He sometimes described artists with the memorable phrase that "there has to be music in it." Despite his abstinence from computers in both his artistic and private life—he never owned a mobile phone or smartphone and wasn't exactly unhappy about it—the retired Herrfurth stated during his lifetime that he could very well imagine publishing his art online. Unfortunately, due to health reasons, he was unable to oversee the creation of a website, and so this presentation remains a posthumous publication, created without his advice and assistance. Instead, it relies on recollections from family members, friends, and former students and professors, as well as a few publications, photographs, diary entries, and, of course, his artwork. Karl-Heinz Herrfurth left behind a substantial body of work when he passed away on November 12, 2015, at the age of 81 in Berlin-Steglitz.