Art stele Otto Eglau

It is August 7, 1950, a hot summer day, when Otto Eglau steps off the island train at Kampen station. Following the recommendation of his university professor, the young Berlin artist has now traveled to Sylt for the first time after several stays on the Baltic Sea. He rents a small room in the "Odin" guesthouse and writes to his brother: "My accommodations are very advantageous – 4,50 marks with breakfast, and a nice studio too." His teacher's intention bears fruit: "The journey to Sylt was a crucial step for me," Eglau reflected many years later. And his son Johannes sums it up: "The shapes of the sea and coast, the ebb and flow of the tide, the receding water, and traces in the sand or mud on the mudflats run through his entire pictorial world." After graduating from high school, the young Otto Eglau was drafted into military service and taken prisoner, from which he was released in 1947. He then began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in his hometown of Berlin, and in 1953 was appointed lecturer in free painting and drawing at the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University of Berlin. Between 1951 and 1970, Eglau undertook numerous study trips, including to Greece, Japan, and the USA. He presented his works in international exhibitions, including in New York, Cairo, and Rio de Janeiro – more than 120 solo exhibitions and over 1976 group exhibitions accumulated by the end of his life. Since his first visit, Otto Eglau repeatedly returned to Kampen, often staying for several months. In 1981, he finally acquired a Frisian house and set up a studio and gallery. "One could often find Otto Eglau on the Kampen beach or on the mudflats. There he recorded his impressions of nature in his sketchbook – he called them 'eye finds'. He then implemented what he saw in his studio," his son reports. Clear lines and structures run through the artist's oeuvre, which has achieved international recognition, particularly in the field of color etching. His consistently devoid of people images border on abstraction. Otto Eglau, who was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in XNUMX, vividly expressed his ambition: "The structures I place behind objects and the lines that hold my pictures are signs of transient life. They are random like the trace a wave leaves in the sand, blurred like the boundary between sea and land, transient like the life of a shell I hold in my hand."