Kurt Mühlenhaupt

Born on 19 January 1921 on the train journey from Prague to Berlin, Kurt Mühlenhaupt later studied at the Berlin University of the Arts (1946–1948). He finances his life as an artist with junk trading, as an lyre box man and as a pub owner of the artists' pub "Leierkasten". After his participation in the Great Berlin Art Exhibition (1960), KM was compared to Heinrich Zille as a “milieu painter”. The Wallstreet Journal Europe calls him “one of Berlin’s most distinctive milieu painters”. “I paint how it is, not how it looks.” Mühlenhaupt’s works oscillate between naïve painting and expressionism. The Art Forum magazine sees him as a forerunner of the “Junge Wilde” emerging at the beginning of the 1980s. “As I paint, so I write.” In 1971, KM was found – alongside Günter Grass and Herta Müller – in the group of “Malerpoeten” (Painter Poets). From 1990, he and his wife Hannelore developed the art centre “Mühlenhaupt Höfe” in Berlin-Kreuzberg. At the same time, they founded the Kurt Mühlenhaupt Museum in Bergsdorf (Brandenburg), which Hannelore will move to the Berlin Mühlenhaupt Höfe in 2019/2020.
www.muehlenhaupt.de