Rainer Fetting was born in Wilhelmshaven in 1949. Initially trained as a carpenter before gaining experience as a stage builder at the National Theatre in Lower Saxony, the artist-to-be enrolled at the Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin (1972-1978, under Hans Jaenisch). During the last years of his training, Fetting established a network of up-and-coming names and helped found the Galerie am Moritzplatz.
This young group, nicknamed the Moritzboys and featuring the likes of Salomé, Bernd Zimmer, Helmut Middendorf, Anne Jud and Berthold Schepers, was sensitive to Fauvist colours and fluidity. They would eventually be integrated into the international emergence of the Junge Wilde (Young Wild Ones) or Neue Wilde (New Wild Ones) movement of the early 1980s, with their localised cityscapes, portraiture and variations on the theme of the Berlin Wall.
Fetting had already left the German capital before this explosion, however, thanks to a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) grant with which he travelled to New York (1978). The American cultural hub would become a secondary place of work and residence. Influenced by the formal liberty and lingering expressiveness of American art, Fetting confirmed his penchant for these emotion-driven examples and embarked on a path that strayed from the cold industrialist ‘manufactured’ aesthetic that was typical of the post-minimal period. Though he favoured cityscapes, highly expressive figures regularly found their way under his brush and into his oeuvre.
Since 1984, sculpture has become a more prominent medium in Fetting’s body of work. Once again, the artist renounced contemporary trends to focus on a brutal, rugged aesthetic. Today, the artist is perhaps best known for his later sculptural work, chiefly due to homage portraits dedicated to Van Gogh and Gauguin.
With this transition came a renewed international interest in his work, leading to exhibition opportunities with some of world’s best-known galleries: Bruno Bischofberger, Mary Boone, Yvon Lambert, Daniel Templon, the Marlborough Gallery, New York, and Anthony d’Offay. In 1981, he took part in the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting, put together by Christos M. Joachimides at the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1984, he participated in the exhibitions Von hier aus – Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf and An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at the MoMA, New York. In 1988, he was part of the exhibition Refigured Painting – The German Image 1960–1988 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
