The Nuremberg painter and sculptor Werner Knaupp passed away on September 9, 2025, at the age of 89. Born on May 3, 1936, Knaupp studied painting in his hometown between 1957 and 1964, among others with Fritz Griebel. In 1986 he was appointed professor of painting there himself. Since 2004 he had been a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Knaupp, who defined himself less through his formal training than through the intense debates of the 1960s with colleagues such as Horst Antes, Reiner Ruthenbeck, and Gerhard Richter, continually reinvented himself stylistically and technically over more than six decades of artistic work. His multifaceted oeuvre ranges from early ballpoint and charcoal drawings to gouaches, pastels, acrylic paintings, ash pictures, iron sculptures, and photographs. Brilliant explosions of color stand alongside shadowy compositions in black and gray. In 1977, Manfred Schneckenburger invited him to participate in documenta 6, where, in the section “ Handzeichnungen. Formen und Funktionen der Zeichnung in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren [Hand Drawings. Forms and Functions of Drawing in the Sixties and Seventies],” he presented his charcoal-drawn Heads.

Knaupp’s artistic beginnings in the 1960s are marked by his meticulously stylized ballpoint pen drawings, situated in the border zone between figuration and abstraction. A decade later, he turned fully to figurative art, accompanied by an exploration of existential thresholds: journeys to extreme landscapes—deserts, volcanic regions, or remote islands—opened, as in the large-format acrylic paintings of the Westman Islands, spaces of reflection on the sublime in nature. His work as a nursing assistant in a psychiatric hospital, at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying in Calcutta, and at the crematorium in Nuremberg shaped his reflections on illness, dying, and death, and found expression in projects such as the iron sculptures of “human bodies after fire.”

Today, Werner Knaupp’s works are represented in many important collections, including the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Kunsthalle Hamburg, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.