Oscar Droege

Oscar Droege was born on 10 January 1898 in Hamburg and died on 8 October 1983, also in Hamburg.

He received painting and drawing lessons as a child and studied at the art academies in Darmstadt and Düsseldorf.

Except for the two great wars he had to take part in as a soldier, he has consistently lived from and for his art – keeping away from the trends of the times and at a conscious distance from art business and art market. Oscar Droege drew and painted in oil, and from 1922, listening to  Professor von Kalkreuth’s suggestions, developed the color woodcut as his preferred technique. The quality of his work and his innovations of technique brought him high recognition and some publicity, nevertheless, with this technique and his motifs, he had to be a kind of outsider. But a sociable one: before 1933 and from 1950 he travelled all over Europe by bicycle – as he himself says: between Lisbon, Rome, Vienna and Bergen.

Although he brought sketches with him from everywhere, most of his elaborated motifs come from his native North German coastal and lake landscape, to which his technique lends a peculiar atmosphere. As a certain kind of japanese colour woodcuts, well esteemed in Europe since the second half of 19th century, he comes to sometimes daring colourfulness and a dramatic movement in the lines – these landscapes had not been imagined this way before.

The canvas prints, some of which are significantly larger than the originals, emphasizes the inherent power of the images.