The Artist Rainer Fetting

The award with which the best journalistic pieces of the year are honored is a bronze statue created by the Berlin painter and sculptor Rainer Fetting: a bust of Henri Nannen.

Henri Nannen was an admirer and passionate collector of expressionistic paintings. It is, therefore, an especially delightful coincidence, that the painter and sculptor Rainer Fetting could be won over to create a statue of Nannen, which is presented to the winners of the award named after him.

Fetting, born in 1949 in Wilhelmshaven, studied at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and belongs to the most outstanding advocates of the German New-Expressionism, who, known as the “Neue Wilde”, caused a sensation in the 80’s. In 1977 together with Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, Anne Jud and others he founded the legendary “Galerie am Moritzplatz” in Berlin a self-help gallery which first enabled these artists to exhibit their provocative pictures. In the meantime Fetting’s color-intense pictures of virtuosic technique can be viewed in public collections in Berlin, Paris and Vancouver. In the summer of 2002 his landscape exhibition at the Kunsthalle Emden, which Herni Nannen himself founded, attracted 15,000 visitors.

At the end of the 80’s Fetting increasingly devoted himself to sculpting and modeled a number of bronze figures. “The contemplative has tamed the wild,” summed up the Berliner Zeitung. After having taken on great cities like Berlin and New York and great role models of art history like van Gogh and the "Brücke"-painters, he entered into a dialog with the “great chairman” Willy Brandt. The more than three-meter high bronze statue at the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party in the Willy-Brandt-Haus in Berlin has become Rainer Fettings most famous work of art.
 
And now again the striking features of yet another important figure of German post-war history has been created directly by the hand of this artist: the bust of the stern-founder and great journalist Henri Nannen – as the highest decoration for the best journalists of our day and age.