1927 | born in Göttingen |
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1946-48 | stonemason apprenticeship |
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1949-53 | Studies at the Academy of Arts in Stuttgart with Otto Baum as well as at the Academy of Arts in Berlin with Karl Hartung and in Paris with Ossip Zadine |
1957 | Art prize "Young West" for sculpture |
1958 | Participation in the XXIX Venice Biennale |
1959 | Villa Massimo scholarship, Rome |
| participation in the documenta II, Kassel |
1960 | XXX. Biennale in Venice |
1963-92 | Professorship at the art academy in Braunschweig |
1964 | Participation in documenta III, Kassel |
1984 | Lower Saxony Prize for Culture |
1992 | Member of the Academy of Arts Berlin-Brandenburg |
| lives in Wolfenbüttel |
With his work Emil Cimiotti represents an authoritative point of view in the plastic art of Germany after 1945. Several times he participated in the documenta in Kassel, represented Germany at the Venice Biennale or at the World Exhibition in Osaka. At a time when the art scene was dominated by Informel, Cimiotti broke away from the traditional forms of sculptural design. The closed volumes of his teachers Otto Baum, Karl Hartung and Ossip Zadkine were replaced by a structuring and breaking up of surfaces. His urge for modulation led - completely in the sense of his artistic role model and pioneer Willi Baumeister - early on to an independent creative will that drew from the experience of inner perception. Free of existing pictorial ideas, his pictorial creativity is characterized by a process of growth that is in keeping with nature but draws from the sensual imagination. Already at the Stuttgart Academy, the master foundryman Herbert Heinzel pointed out to him the peculiarities of the lost wax casting process. Cimiotti transformed the closed core form into rhythmized structures. The working process makes a decisive contribution to finding the form. It is not the form that emerges from the block, but the process of creative growth and the resulting structure of an inside and outside that characterize the sculpture. Before Cimiotti casts them in bronze, he forms them from a mixture of beeswax, rosin and kerosene. His sculptures grow organically upwards and form ding-like motifs such as mountains, trees or honeycombs. His sculptures form structural models that do not focus on details, but rather represent the essence of what is seen and felt, of what is perceived in all its breadth.