About Hans Reichel

Born: 1892 in Würzburg
Died: 1958 in Paris

Hans Reichel was born in Würzburg on 9 August 1892. After leaving school, the very talented young Reichel does not know whether he would rather become a painter or a writer and therefore begins training in both fields. Reichel became acquainted with Rilke, for example, whose poetry and literature he was very taken with.
After a short period of teaching in an art school during 1918, however, he received the decisive impetus from Paul Klee, who was the focus of attention in Munich at the time. Klee's "cosmic pictures" were the starting point. They gave Reichel the idea of painting "imaginarily". Compared to Klee, Reichel's works are more poetically naive, more straightforward and more emotional.
Before Klee was appointed to the Bauhaus in 1920, he rented a studio in the Werneckschlößl, where Reichel also lived. The connection between the two deepened and Reichel visited his friend in Weimar in 1924. Here he met Kandinsky, Gropius and Feininger. Since working in a collective was not at all in keeping with his nature, he opted for his own artistic realisation in Paris. He lived there from 1928 for the following twelve years. His paintings are the result of his deeply mystical and poetically sensitive soul, which is able to place things in a dreamlike relationship to one another. By means of overlapping lines and superimposing translucent surfaces, Reichel exposes a transparency that he would achieve ever more subtly in his later work with the help of the technique of watercolour. From 1939 Reichel was interned in various camps until he managed to escape in 1944 and return to Paris. His late watercolours are characterised by "floating forms", veils of colour and free colour forms that "wash over" the page and heighten the translucent delicacy of the earlier works. Thus, after Reichel's death, his work of "lyrical abstraction" was commemorated in 1960 with a comprehensive exhibition in Cologne and at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover.