Topic: New insights into Friedrich Nerly's work and the collection of his works
Speaker: Prof. Dr. phil. Kai Uwe Schierz, art historian, Erfurt city administration
Time: Friday, June 13, 2025, 3:00 p.m.
Location: TU Ilmenau, Faradaybau (new building), Faraday lecture hall, access and parking lot from Prof.-Schmidt-Straße
Admission: 5 Euro
For four years, two art historians and numerous restorers dedicated themselves to a major inventory research and conservation project on the oil studies and paintings of the painter Friedrich Nerly, who was born in Erfurt in 1807 and died in Venice in 1878. Nerly decreed that the paintings would be donated to his hometown after his death, which led to the founding of the Erfurt Municipal Museum in 1886. At the beginning of the year , Erfurt's Angermuseum held a major exhibition of around 200 works, many of which were presented to the public for the first time, showing how his artistic talent developed from his early student years until his death. The show was so successful that it will be shown again, with a new concept, until July 20.
In his lecture at the TU Ilmenau Citizens' Campus, Prof. Kai Uwe Schierz, art historian for the city of Erfurt, will explain why we are now paying tribute to Nerly, who was primarily perceived as a Romantic painter in his time, as an artist who combined both sides in his work: the Romantic perspective and the open-air painting method that was just emerging at the time. Thanks to his early oil studies, Nerly was already regarded as one of the leading German plein-air painters at the time. But he also took on the role of a pioneer and trendsetter during his successful years in Venice: in the unique setting of the lagoon city, he knew how to stage himself imaginatively, building on the innovative aesthetics he had developed in Rome during his first years in Italy: Here, as an early open-air painter, he had already created small paintings of great modernity by day and night.
