Anton Stankowski – Frei und Angewandt | Free and Applied. 1925 - 1995

The painter, photographer and commercial artist Anton Stankowski was born in 1906 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. The basic concepts for his work developed out of the context of the 1920s. Lasting impressions were made on him especially by the New Objectivity, the Russian avant-garde, the Stijl movement, and the theoretical concepts of the Bauhaus. Stankowski was a dedicated proponent of the unity of free and applied art. For the field of commercial art, this approach logically entails the most demanding of artistic expectations. In advertising, he utterly renounces decorative elements and concentrates, in the visual realization of the information to be conveyed, on objective and compressed representation.

In his photography, this approach leads to the nearing of reality in an immediate form of presentation befitting this medium. Stankowski's street scenes created at the end of the 1920s clearly reveal the demands he imposed in this respect. Stankowski is considered a predecessor of the "Züricher Konkrete," and of the "Neue Fotografie." These movements turned away from stylized artistic photography as it had been cultivated by conservative photographers since the beginning of this century.

Commercial art and photography, however, are not the only fields in which Stankowski has become involved. He has increasingly dedicated himself to painting and has shown his works in a number of exhibitions since the 1970s. His earliest paintings date from about 1925.