Irma Hünerfauth, also known as IRMAnipulations (31 December 1907 – 11 December 1998) was a German painter, sculptor and object artist who turned junkyard scrap into sculptures, machines and kinetic art objects that mocked consumer society. She opposed traditional academic art, rebelled against academism and followed radical contemporary art trends in post-war Germany. Through her work she is related to the concept of artists from the post-war modernity (Abstract expressionism, Fluxus, Informalism, Tachisme) as well as the Nouveau Réalisme group of artists, such as Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Arman as well as Daniel Spoerri.cf. S. Partsch, AKL, World Biographical Dictionary of Artists, vol. 75. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin, 2012-13.
Life
Hünerfauth was born on 31 December 1907 in Donaueschingen, the daughter of a brewery manager. After a fire in 1914, her family moved to Munich. In 1917 Hünerfauth attended a class on drawing for adults. During her school time in 1923 she underwent practical training in shop window design in a fashion shop and continued this training from 1925 until 1928. From 1925 until 1928, she attended the Female Labor School in Munich and from 1929 until 1932 she attended the Arts School for Design in Munich as a student under Helmuth Ehmcke. In 1933 Hünerfauth married the lawyer Wilhelm Schäfer, with whom she had a son. From 1935 until 1937 she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich under Professor Jank and Professor Hess.
In 1938 Hünerfauth divorced Schäfer and moved to the Dachauer Moos near Munich. In 1939 she married her second husband, Jost Höpker, but they divorced soon afterwards.Irma Hünerfauth, Peter Lufft and Christoph Wiedemann. IRMAnipulations, p. 119. Publisher Antje Kunstmann, Munich, 1990.
In 1940, Hünerfauth returned to live with her parents in Grosshesselohe near Munich. In 1942, she was evacuated to Chiemsee and later to the area of Landshut. In 1945, the family returned to Grosshesselohe, where Hünerfauth built an atelier. On 20 November 1948, she married her third husband, Franz Führer, also known by his artist's name "Führer-Wolkenstein". They remained married for 28 years. Franz Führer worked as a construction manager for the public utilities of Munich. As an artist, Führer-Wolkenstein worked closely with Hünerfauth and assisted her with detailed electrotechnical work for her multimedia art projects. After his retirement he created kinetic art objects, so-called recycling machines.
In 1954 Hünerfauth received private training from Conrad Westpfahl, an important artist of Informal Art, which led her to abstract painting. In 1958 she attended courses on etching and lithography. In 1959, she was awarded the Prix d'Unions des Femmes Peintres in Paris for her painting titled Düsternis (Gloom). Two female artists (Lentz and Strauss) expressed their disapproval and one of them cut her painting with a knife. Hünerfauth had it restored.Irma Hünerfauth, Peter Lufft and Christoph Wiedemann. IRMAnipulations, p. 120. Publisher Antje Kunstmann, Munich, 1990. The art critic Franz Roh and his wife Juliane Roh were early supporters and patrons of Hünerfauth's work. They encouraged her and featured her work very positively in their publications. When Franz Roh died, Hünerfauth printed a series of ten lithographs In Memory of Franz Roh, 1966. In 1962, she attended a course on welding and subsequently began to sculpt in scrap metal. In 1964 she received the advancement award from the Herbstsalon München (Autumn exhibition Art Salon Munich).
In 1965, Hünerfauth founded the "Gruppe K" (Group K) in Munich,Gruppe K, Mappenwerk, 12 Originalgrafiken der Gruppe K, Munich, 1965. together with the artists Walter Raum (1923–2009), Dieter Stöver (1924–1988) and Hans Joachim Strauch. In 1966 she was awarded the Medaille de Bronze de la Ville de Paris.
In 1968/69 Hünerfauth turned away from painting. She created her first projects for exhibitions with the artists of Gruppe K (Group K) to be seen at the Haus der Kunst (House of Arts) Munich, called the optical-acoustic collage for piano and speakers; and together with her husband she created vibrational objects from 1971 onwards. In 1972, she created her first 'sprechende Kästen' (speaking boxes) on the themes of loneliness, first love and war. All of these objects required detailed technical attention. Führer-Wolkenstein, who also invented an earthing contact tester, was her partner for those technical art projects. He was cautious, thoughtful and intense while she was spontaneous with an intensive willingness and a strong impulse for her decisions, so they complemented each other's temper.Irma Hünerfauth, Peter Lufft and Christoph Wiedemann. IRMAnipulations, p. 56. Publisher Antje Kunstmann, Munich, 1990. On 25 November 1976 Führer-Wolkenstein died. Hünerfauth built a funerary monument for him out of scrap metal at the cemetery of Pullach in Munich. Then, Hünerfauth started to specialize in so called "Artist's Prayer Books" in the 1980s and 1990s, which she created from micro-electronic scrap. The use of these materials as well as the construction of the so-called "speaking boxes" were unique and distinguished her from other object artists of that time.
In 1990 Hünerfauth was awarded the Schwabinger Kunstpreis in Munich. On 12 November 1998 she died in Kreuth (Tegernsee).
Career
Hünerfauth began her career as a figurative painter. Her early work features bold and unexpected perspectives and an unusual coloration. Franz Roh said that her concentration was on neither a picturesque tachism nor a graphically linear constructivism, but that she should be understood between those. Her style of painting was a "highly individual crossing of tranquillity and mobility in the picture".Irma Hünerfauth, Peter Lufft and Christoph Wiedemann. IRMAnipulations, p. 9, p. 53. Publisher Antje Kunstmann, Munich, 1990. She experimented with unusual tools, such as the use of a dentist's drill for a series of drypoint prints.
Her teacher Conrad Westpfahl, a renowned artist of Informal Art, led her to develop into an abstract painter. She advanced her mixed media technique with collages and applications from different materials. Next she started to tinker and construct and since then worked three-dimensionally only. The following realized objects (scrap sculptures, metal collages (assemblage), etc.) connected her work with the Nouveaux Realistes group.cf. S. Partsch, AKL, World Biographical Dictionary of Artists, vol. 75. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin, 2012-13.
Hünerfauth always titled her work with the term IRMAnipulations, a word creation which was invented during an exhibition at the Goethe Institut in London in 1983 and kept by the artist as a kind of trademark. One of the most important retrospective exhibitions of her oeuvre titled "Irma Hünerfauth – IRMAnipulations" was held from 3 August until 2 September 1990 in the town hall of Munich.
Painting
Hünerfauth's artistic career began as a painter. At first she was taught in the craft of painting during a solid traditional academic training under the professors Jank and Hess at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich. Thus at first, Hünerfauth painted figurative landscapes (e.g., Isartalbahnhof, 1938) and portraits, mostly from her familial environment (e.g., Familie Hünerfauth, 1946) and if she had followed that norm, she would have become a respectable painter of the post-impressionism style. But indeed, even the paintings of her early period featured their own signature style. Occasionally, expressionistic elements can be found, for example the wildly moved landscape forms in the painting "Pupplinger Au" (1950) or "Mother and Son" (1952), which show strong emotional movement and deepness. The first mentioned owes much to Edvard Munch "The Scream" (1892).
From 1954, under the influence of Conrad Westpfahl, she began painting abstractly. One of her last paintings, Winter in Gries (1958), forgoes perspective entirely and conventionalizes the buildings to abstract areas. Now, she wanted to remove all the decorative art elements completely. Her paintings of the following years can be described as consequent as well as radical. She "attempts to bring the inventive impulse to an inner equilibrium by supporting it with a meditative character. Together the severity of the order and the softness of the whole gain the dramatic power of a dialogue. The dialogue lends movement and a facetting to the surface which seems haunted by a kind of dream".cf. Conrad Westpfahl. In: Irma Hünerfauth, exh. cat., Bruckmann, Munich, 1960. On the other hand, strong emotions are expressed abstractly, with a chaotic mixup of brushstrokes, an excessive frenzy of colors, vigorous and in a rough-textured style, as in her mixed media composition Untitled (1963). Occasionally her mostly large-sized paintings owe much to abstract Expressionism and the pioneers of Action painting, such as Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler. Her work is sometimes playful, as in the painting "16.1.1963" (1963), and sometimes experimental as in the painting The red Infamy (1966), in which she fixated metal wires through the canvas similar to a collage. Her abstract painting unites emotional expressiveness with graphic rigor.
In 1969, she painted the "letzte Bild" (last picture – 1969/1989). It features a painted perforated metal plate on which emotional impulses run riot as if they were driven by electronic force. In the right corner, one can spot a drain plug with a chain simply fixated on canvas, a find, a piece of scrap that profanely ironizes the whole utopian and playfully futuristic portrayal, just like the subject that seems to be placed somewhere between space and earth. She expresses herself on the canvas playfully, headstrong, sometimes curious but also visionary. However, it seems that even the surface of a large canvas has become too small, as a suitable playing field of her present intentions. She had already built her first sculptural objects and she seemed to concentrate on one form of expression, eventually it should be working in the three-dimensional form.Irma Hünerfauth, Peter Lufft and Christoph Wiedemann. IRMAnipulations, p. 9. Publisher Antje Kunstmann, Munich, 1990. After "letzte Bild" she unexpectedly stopped painting and left only a relatively small oeuvre of pictures (Wilhelm Schäfer counts only 45 paintings which remained in the artist's estate, excluding watercolors and drawings). The turning away from painting marked the end of the sixties and was symptomatically for lots of other contemporary artists, too. Hünerfauth wanted to experiment, just as artists like her did it at that time.
She partly returned to figurative painting, for example in sketches of her three-dimensional work and also later as she painted the picture "Mutter auf dem Weg zur Urmutter" (Mother becomes primordial mother, 1981).
Prints