German painter and sculptor, born in Reichenberg (now Liberec, Czech Republic). His family moved to West Germany in 1948. In 1964 he began his so-called ‘dithyrambic’ paintings in reference to the Dionysian cult, of special significance in German philosophy because of Nietzsche's invocation of it in his book The Birth of Tragedy (1892), as in opposition to the calm ordered cult of Apollo. The idea, formalized by a manifesto of 1966, was to fill an abstract form with expressive pathos. His best-known work is the triptych Black-Red-Gold-dithyrambic (1974, Galerie der Staat, Stuttgart). This consists of three near-identical images of ancient war emblems including a helmet, apparently abandoned in a field but still potentially menacing. Another motif has been the actual attributes of painting—the brush and the palette.