265 - Fritz Köthe, “Jeans”, large-format oil painting from 1995, framed

Fritz Köthe, “Jeans”, large-format oil painting from 1995, framed Fritz Köthe, 1916 - Berlin - 2005, German Pop Art artist, “Jeans”, oil on canvas, 131 x 160 cm, signed, dated 1995, labelled and signed on the reverse, framed About the artist: From 1936, Fritz Köthe studied at the Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig, where, however, he received poor marks due to his engagement with ‘degenerate art’. In 1960, Köthe moved to Berlin, where he soon developed his own visual language through painted collages featuring motifs from advertising. He dispensed entirely with his own sketches and, from then on, drew everything that appears in his pictures from ‘that glossy, banal surrealism which surrounds him - and us - day in, day out, like a second nature’. Köthe made his selections on purely aesthetic grounds, and his focus was always on juxtaposition - for example, cars and girls, metal and flesh, chrome and the body. Florian Illies described him as the ‘BRD Godfather of Pop’.