Over the course of no fewer than seven decades, Hermann Naumann (1930–2025) produced a body of work that is both extensive and magnificent. His universal talent – rare of its kind – combined with a seemingly inexhaustible creative drive and energy, has given rise to a life’s work whose diversity is astonishing. Across various art forms, and within the countless techniques he mastered and pushed to their very limits, Hermann Naumann continually forged new and uniquely personal forms of expression.

His spectrum of visual expression ranged from representational, figurative and organic to abstract, constructive and geometric – at all times and across all genres, in the 1960s just as much as in the years after 2000, in sculpture no less than in painting and printmaking. Stylistically, his art meandered between representational expressiveness, Suprematism, lyrical Surrealism and Constructivism. And yet he managed, with almost childlike ease, to remain recognisable in all these expressions.

So soon after his death, we cannot truly take stock of this body of work as a whole, neither in terms of its quantity nor its quality. What we can already recognise today is a wealth of inner imagery, a love of literature that time and again inspired congenial reinterpretations, a veritable obsession with mastering artistic techniques, an unmistakable delight in vibrant colours and musically composed sounds, a tireless pursuit of beauty, a joy in experimentation that persisted into old age and seemed almost boyish, and, alongside this and not least, an obsessive, voyeuristic eroticism.

We pay tribute to a great, dazzling artist and his work.