In his laudatory speech, State Secretary Jürgen Hardeck emphasized that fine arts need good artists and that Thomas Duttenhoefer “fulfils this requirement in three respects: as the creator of large sculptures in public space, as a representative of sacred art and as a portraitist.” Examples from the work testify to this Among other things, he named his “Bischof Ketteler Monument” on the Bishop’s Square in Mainz, created in 1993, and his portraits of the film director Edgar Reitz.
Thomas Duttenhoefer left Speyer in 1967 with a special permit from the Werkkunstschule in Wiesbaden. After studying in Wiesbaden and London, the city of Darmstadt invited him in 1979 to move into one of the artist houses in the “Rosenhöhe” artist colony.
Duttenhoefer first held professorships at the Trier University of Applied Sciences and then at the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences until his retirement in 2015. Exhibitions made him known as a sculptor and graphic artist at home and abroad.
Purrmann prizewinner
In Speyer, too, Duttenhoefer’s works have been on view again and again over the course of his artistic life, which has now lasted more than five decades, in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently in a large show for his 70th birthday, which the Kunstverein and the Städtische Galerie jointly organized. In 1981 he was awarded the Hans Purrmann Prize of the city of Speyer, and in 1984 he won the competition of the deaconess hospital with his “Lazarusweg”. The two large sculptures of the “Way of Lazarus” will soon find their new home in the park of the Deaconess Foundation Hospital.
In his humorous but not uncritical acceptance speech, Duttenhoefer, who Hardeck described as “one of the most exciting figures in art in Rhineland-Palatinate”, reviewed stations and encounters in his career. His special thanks go to his teachers Thomas Schubert, Alo Altripp, Robert Preyer and Erwin Schutzbach, as well as to all those who “paved his artistic path”, which he “had to tread himself with full dedication, full commitment and full risk.”
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