Johannes Grützke (1937 Berlin - 2017 ibid) (F) The winner, gouache and chalk pastel on paper, mat inner dimensions 97 cm x 71 cm, signed, dated 71, paper cockled, slightly scratchedWith his right hand raised in a joyful greeting and a laurel wreath draped loosely over his left shoulder, the "victor" stands as if directly before the beholder. Johannes Grützke, one of the most idiosyncratic and talented scandal artists of the Berlin art world once said of himself, "I'm a classic, like a monument on a pedestal waiting for someone from the avant garde to topple me." With this same sense of irony, he often depicted himself as the subject of his own works, "when no model was available".Johannes Grützke was born on 30th September 1937 in Berlin and studied at the Berlin Hochschule der Bildenden Künste from 1957 to 1964. The painter, draughtsman, printmaker and medal caster participated in Oskar Kokoschka's summer academy in Salzburg in 1962. From 1976 to 1977 he held a position as a visiting professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg and later took over from his former teacher Oskar Kokoschka at the summer academy in Salzburg. He was also among the founding members of the Künstlersonderbund in Germany, an organisation founded to support artistic proponents of realism. In the 1970s his style of representational art, which he mastered with an exceptionally high level of craftsmanship, went against the international trend towards abstraction, which was directed above all against the prescribed art form of Socialist Realism. His most important works include the monumental figural frieze of German parliamentarians in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt from 1991.