Karl Hurm

After Hurm had taken over his parents' fruit- and vegetable retail store in Weildorf in 1949, he used his weekly shopping trips to the wholesalers' market in Stuttgart to visit the museums there and study the masterpieces of painters like Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee, Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin, Marc Chagall and Jean Tinguely, whom he later named as sources of inspiration for his own motifs and painting technique.

: woman watching television) won first prize at the "Sunday-painter's competition" for amateur artists of the Eisenmann Company, in Böblingen.

Since that time, Karl Hurm's paintings have been displayed in more than 200 individual and collective exhibitions in Europe, the United States, as well as in Japan.

Prominent subjects are people, houses, cows, horses, meadows and forests, landscapes in the changing seasons, scenes of everyday life.

: Viaduct in winter landscape) small, stocky men seem to be hiding from tall, voluptuous, red-haired women, or, in Gelber Hügel (1998, transl.

: Tower in winter landscape), birds take on the colours and outlines of bushes (Großer Vogel mit drei Bäumen, 1986, transl.

Winter landscapes and interiors gave Hurm the opportunity to explore "unconventional dominances of colours"[6] (Blumenstrauß mit gelbem Vorhang, 1989, transl.

Fragments of panty hoses, shoelaces, brush bristles, chain links, wire mesh, string bags, twigs and beechnuts were pasted into compositions in the collage technique.

Chewing gum, pressed flat into moulds as bas-reliefs, slightly raise figures above the surface to produce sculptural effects.

During that same period, Karl Hurm also experimented with different surfaces like old furnace doors, iron plates, metal sheets, or pieces of wood as base materials in order to create paintings that seem to have originated in distant prehistoric times.

[10] Since 1969, Karl Hurm has participated in the exhibitions of naïve art at the Gallery Eisenmann, Böblingen (Germany) where he won the first prize in 1972.

In 1972, he is honoured by Hermann-Josef Speier with a first individual exhibition at the gallery "die schwarze Treppe", at Haigerloch (Germany).