Heinz Hemrich


Heinz Hemrich was a German sculptor.
Born in Schwäbisch Hall, Hemrich performed military service from 1942 to 1945. He studied from 1946 to 1951 at the Kunstschule Mainz, the Kunstakademie Stuttgart and the Darmstädter Werkkunstschule. From 1951 to 1953 he was assistant at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt and a freelance sculptor from 1953. In 1963 he took a teaching position at the Kunsthochschule Mainz. From 1973 he worked at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, first as a lecturer and later as a professor. Among his students was Karlheinz Oswald. Hemrich was from 1957 a member of the Darmstädter Sezession and participated in several of its exhibitions.
Hemrich executed numerous commissions for public buildings such as universities, churches and schools. His focus was Percent for Art and small sculptural works. In 1963/64 he created new concrete buttresses with symbolic representations of civic history for St. Christoph, Mainz, where Johannes Gutenberg was baptised and which was damaged in World War II. For the Protestant Auferstehungskirche in Mainz, he took the late medieval motif of a pictured Bible and redesigned it as a concrete frieze.

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