Lazlo Emmerich

Biography

Lazlo Emmerich was born near Hanover, Germany. When Emmerich was five years old, his father died in World War II and his family moved to Delft, Netherlands. Emmerich's talent for painting was discovered at an early age, and so while still a teenager he was able to apprentice to a noted Flemish painter.

Despite the many distractions of his early adulthood - writing Beat poetry in the 1950s, fomenting revolution as a left-wing radical in the 1960s, and flirting with large-scale steel structures in the 1970s - Emmerich eventually developed a mature and personal style of painting. Subtlety, stark imagery, earthy colors, and distressed paint surfaces began to mark his work and continue to this day.

On the meaning of individual works of art he is silent, saying only, "We are all, in an existential sense, alone, but we can find purity and beauty and even enrichment in that aloneness no matter how bleak or desolate it may seem." Emmerich divides his time between his winter studio in Bandung, Indonesia, and his summer home near Amsterdam.