As one of Germany's best known contemporary painters, Peter Robert Keil's dynamic shapes and impressive choice of colors are particularly popular with a generation of European collectors. Once know as 'the Wild Man of Berlin", Keil is one of the now infamous Neo-Expressionist "Grossen Wilden" (Young Fauves) sharing the limelight with the storied artists Elvira Bach , Rainer Fetting, and George BaseIitz. Later, he developed friendships with fellow artists Juan Miro, Andy Warhol, and while living and traveling in Spain, he would occasionally exchange comments on art with Picasso and Salvador Dali. Work by Peter Robert Keil can be found at art exhibitions, museums and galleries, private collections of the rich and famous, in offices and hotels, as well as some of the leading auction houses in Europe. In the United States, Kiel is represented by his friend T. Michael Kost, owner of RaZoO GaLLeRy in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
Keil's impassioned paintings are primarily oil-based paints with a mixture of oil and acrylics on canvas, board, cardboard, ceramic and any other medium that will transport his vibrant primary colors and keen social commentary. Admittedly, Kiel's inspiration is based on his view of man as an essentially social being. Not restricted by convention or bound by narrow-minded moralistic self-righteousness, the painter is free to portray the reality of our often not-too-subtle interactions with other people in bars, on the streets, in flea markets, at work and at play in public places. While his work does not serve to illustrate the illusions of candy-colored reality or empty vain beauty, Keil primarily centers his compositions on the human forms -faces, heads, figures and torso. With a keen eye to the super-reality behind the facade, Keil is fascinated by the stories of people on the fringes of society, those who have been pushed too far - the down and out, thieves, drug addicts, pimps artists and whores--those characters who chose an existence on the other side of society.
"Dream Boy"
"Rolling Stones Concert in
Berlin"
"Maryln Monroe"
"Lake Wannasee"
"Munich Transexual Gay Boy"
"Fish and Chips Beatles"
"
"Dreaming
Madonna"
"Solitary"
"Orange
Vase Floral"
"Broadway
Faces"
"Dreaming
Madonna"
"Girl
From New York"
"Flowers
From New York"
"Garden
Flowers"
"Fish
and Chips Beatles"
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Peter Robert Keil was born in August 1942 in Züllichau I Pommern (now Poland). His father was killed in the early years of World War Two. After the death of his father on the Eastern Front, mother and son set out to make their way through the chaos of battered Germany to West Berlin. There he grew up in the neighborhood of grey blocks of houses, the typical backyards and the trees of the park nearby. There the young Keil attended school with singer Conny Froboes and film star Horst Buchholz.
Ten-year-old Peter Robert Keil fascinated by the books he found in the art section of the local library. There he admired the works of the Expressionists, Picasso in particular. The expressiveness of the vivid color opened a way to temporarily escape from the dullness and depression of everyday life in post-war Germany as Peter made his first attempts at visual art. In the beginning, Peter studied and copied the style of the great master Picasso whom he later met in Spain. The public response to Peter's work was positive with a few quick sales but buyers encouraged him to develop his own signature style.
At the age of 15 he met the painter Otto Nagel, who was working on social background studies and became his first teacher and mentor. Otto Nagel introduced Keil to painting techniques, taught him realistic painting, and how to deal with colors. As a young man, Keil accompanied Nagel on his tours of Berlin's back streets. They often painted from nature and the young Keil learned to see his neighborhood with the eyes of an artist. Teaching him the painter's craft and introducing him to outdoor painting, Nagel also influenced his motifs as well as his color palette.
Keil refined his technique and broadened his knowledge when he studied at Berlin's "Akademie fur Bildende Kiinste." While at the Berlin Academy of Fines Arts, Keil treated his studies cavalierly. Thought to be an advanced student by his instructors, the Academy brought about some important acquaintances and contacts. There he met Baselitz, Fetting, Lupertz and Schonebeck and made friends with Salome, Schmettau and other important artists.
In 1961 he attended Baselitz's and Schonebeck's public presentation of their "Pandemonium Manifesto" at the "Grossgorschen 35" gallery. Keil also became at regular at Herta Fiedler's who much like Gertrude Stein in her day, became known as the "artists' mother." Keil was a well-known denizen of "Kleine Weltlateme" in Moritzplatz, a meeting place for the emerging avant-garde "Junge Wilde" ("YoungFauves") artists, and he became the darling of art circles earning him the nickname the 'Wildman of Berlin" for his passion for art and living.
The erection of the Berlin Wall interrupted the relationship with his famous mentor when Nagel was trapped beyond the Wall in East Berlin. Another important factor in those formative years of Keil's artistic development was his close friendship with the painter Juan Miro whom he had met in Mallorca, Spain in the early sixties. Mirò repeatedly invited him to his studio in Palma, high above the Gala Major bay. The intense sunlight as well as the vivid colors of the Mediterranean region were important sources of inspiration for both Miro and Peter Robert Keil. From his friend, Peter learned that "a picture begins to enforce and to reveal itself under the artist's brush during the act of painting" (Mirò). The freedom of rhythmic structuring, the verve and brightness of the vocabulary of primary colors and pure form lead him away from realistic way of seeing and depicting his art to a freer, more "raw" neo-expressionistic style of painting. In the early 1990's BBC television ran an extended interview with Keil discussing his times with the famed Miro in his studio.
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After Peter left Spain, he found a small studio in Paris near Place de Bastie. Living the carefree artist's life in Paris, the young Keil had a great time in the cafes, bars and restaurants of magnificent city and all it had to offer. By day he studied the Old Masterpieces in the museums, at night he painted portraits in bars to earn his living. Outcasts of the Parisian street scene and prostitutes were not only his models, but often thankful customers.
While in France, Keil continued to develop and learn dynamic and spontaneous brushwork techniques. Free of nature's constraints, the artist further distanced his painting from representational realism, seeking his own freer form. At night he came into contact with colorful characters, among them thieves, alcoholics, drug addicts, artists and streetwalkers who served as models for his sketches. This environment, with its eschewing of bourgeois convention, had a strong attraction for the young artist. His newly found social awareness is reflected in his pictures and portraits which already carried his individual trademark. By their coarseness, dynamism, vibrant coloring and subject matter, they are a visual record of the early phase of West German neo-expressionist painting.
London was the young artist's next place of residence. There he rented a small flat in Earlscourt. For a year he enjoyed 'Swinging London' before he found his way back to Berlin to paint on a full-time basis. Keil now lives there with his family for several months of the year and for the rest of the year he prefers the rural life in Bavaria or his condo in south Florida.
In his German period, Keil is a contemporary witness of the consequences the erection the Wall had for West Berlin and the revolt against it. In one impressive painting he shows people protesting in front of Brandenburger Tor and he later often painted the place of protest, Glinicker Brucke, as a symbol of separation of East and West Germany.
Even in his later work, a considerable number of paintings reflect Berlin's ecstatic attitude towards life and politics in the late sixties and the seventies. When the hippie movement engulfed Western Europe, Keil turned from observer to active participant. The chance of intensifying one's excitement and inner images with drugs was an enticement he could not resist and critics often note what they assume to be a drug-induced sense of form, color, and composition in works of that period.
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