Biography

Heinrich Neuy is born on 27 July in the pilgrimage town of Kevelaer on the Lower Rhine

He begins an apprenticeship as a carpenter. On Christmas Eve he receives his first paintbox and, encouraged by the landscape painter Josef Pauels, starts making landscape and portrait studies

After completing his apprenticeship he attends the School of Applied Arts in Krefeld. The furniture and interior designs he creates there are marked by clear functionality and rigour. He receives an award for outstanding achievement in freehand drawing

Heinrich Neuy studies at the Bauhaus in Dessau, among others under the architects and artists Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Lilly Reich, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The course in psychology is led by Dr Karlfried Graf Dürckheim. As the political situation grows more acute, he takes leave in March 1932 for a practical seminar but never returns to the Bauhaus. More than 50 years would pass before he saw it again

Further training as a carpenter and takeover of his father-in-law’s joinery in Borghorst

Military service as an air force soldier

American captivity as a prisoner of war in four different camps. In Wyoming and Nebraska he sketches portraits of fellow prisoners, which decades later he would use for a series of pictures showing heads built from geometric patterns

British captivity. Laid up in a military hospital with an inflamed leg, he has the good fortune to meet an elderly Scottish army doctor who gives him both the opportunity and the materials to continue his abstract painting. Five „Thunderstorm“ pictures are created, along with extensive cycles on the themes of „Poetry“ and „Joy“. In October he returns from captivity to Borghorst

He resumes the joinery business and works as a master craftsman training apprentices

Exhibition work resumes. The beginning of his „Demonstrative Painting“

Membership of the Welbergen Circle

Heinrich Neuy begins the watercolour series „Architektura“

The start of his collaboration with Buster Flood, a composer living in Borghorst, who sets Heinrich Neuy’s pictures to music while the paintings in turn draw inspiration from the compositions

Heinrich Neuy begins the cycle „Classical Character Pictures“

He opens a gallery of his own

He is awarded the Culture Prize of the City of Steinfurt

After 62 years Heinrich Neuy returns to the Bauhaus Dessau with an exhibition of his own work

On the occasion of his 85th birthday, the art object „Energy, Integrity, Activity“ created by Heinrich Neuy is ceremonially unveiled in his honour. In the same year he receives the Culture Prize of the District of Steinfurt

A primary school in his home town is named after Heinrich Neuy

Heinrich Neuy dies on 24 March

On 1 June the Heinrich Neuy Bauhaus Museum opens in Borghorst/Steinfurt