Josef Nowinka

It took a long time to discover Josef Nowinka. Only after the artist's death did the gallery owner Johannes Zielke come across his life's work. He made him interesting. 

Nowinka's image of women is capable of triggering discussions posthumously. But does an artist owe the world moral good conduct? In his paintings, Nowinka usually looks at his own obsessions with comic honesty. The artist's appraising view of women may challenge the bad puritan conscience; he transformed the sexisms and neuroses of his generation of men into art. 

Despite the female type clichés, Nowinka is cooler than his colleagues from GDR commercial art with their chummy macho complicity. Because he speaks honestly of his own desires and tries to integrate the breasts of his beloved into a two-dimensional, abstracted context that does not omit the sorrows and euphoria of everyday socialist life. 

The fact that he was hardly noticed by the cultural milieu of the GDR is less due to his pictures than to the self-imposed restraint of the artist, who was known to Harald Hakenbeck, Hanfried Schulz, Robert Rehfeldt and Lothar Böhme, and yet sought his livelihood in an inconspicuous way outside art.