JÜRGEN MITRANSKY – THE POET OF LIGHT

JÜRGEN MITRANSKY – THE POET OF LIGHT is a video created on the occasion of the painter's solo exhibition at the Old City Hall in Split, in May 2016. Screened during the event, this short documentary familiarised the visitors with some details of the artist’s life, his working methodology and sources of inspiration.

About the painter

Jürgen Mitransky is a freelance artist who lives in Berlin and on the Island of Murter.
He was born in Rendsburg in 1939, a small town on the river Eider in the most northern German province of Schleswig-Holstein, where he spent most of his childhood. The area is situated next to the busiest waterway connecting the North and Baltic Seas and it left a huge impact on the artist. As a young man, he often observed ships travelling upstream and downstream, swam in the channel whose shores were connected with ferry lines, and walked the yellow fields of rape which served as his first graphic researches.
He started school in his hometown of Rendsburg and was eventually trained as a of shop-window decorator.
Being curious and adventurous, he intensively explored the world already in his early age. He travelled to the North Sea by bike and hitch-hiked across Germany, Italy and south France. He was discovering art spontaneously and marginally, not sensing that painting would become his calling one day. When he was sixteen, he saw a Van Gogh painting for the first time and it remained engraved in his memory.
He comes from a humble German family, as the second oldest of four brothers. His father, a soldier and a banker, early left the family. His mother was musically gifted, she played the piano, while his grandfather painted a little and led a private choir which tells us a little about his pre-dispositions for art from his mother’s side.
The art of decorating brought him to Berlin, where he was employed in the most popular German department store KaDeWe. He has lived in Germany’s capital ever since.
After studying graphic design at the Academy of Graphic, Print and Advertisements (Staatliche Akademie für Grafik, Druck und Werbung), he temporarily lived in Munich where he worked as a graphic designer.
In his late twenties, he decided to resume studies at the College of Fine Arts in Berlin (Hochschule für bildende Künste, today’s Universität der bildenden Künste) in the class of professor Fred Thieler, a well-known German tachist.
Jürgen Mitransky was thus shaped by two traditions: the tradition of Bauhaus in artistic education as a graphic artist and the post-war painting under the influence of German realists. In the post-war Berlin he had the chance to meet many great painters such as American expressionists Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and others.
He attended master class with professor Johannes Geccellio. He was an intern and passed two state exams after which he became a high school professor in Rendsburg and Berlin. He was teaching art, design, graphic design, architecture, painting and visual communication, but his best qualifications referred to the science of colours, a topic he has been exploring since his student days.
In fact, Aristotle's book On the Soul (Über die Seele), which deals with colour as a means of expression, played a key role. The science of colours was extremely appreciated in the Antiquity and later in the age of the Renaissance. It became an inspiration and style of a number of powerful colourists like Delauney and George Seurat, and other powerful artists... including Mitransky himself.

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Mitransky lives in Berlin, a city that was once divided. He witnessed the division of Germany, but also the fall of the Berlin wall. All of this influenced him as an artist and formed him as a painter who lives with the tradition. However, on the other hand, he has always been ready for exploring new horizons. He now spends half of the year on the Dalmatian Island of Murter. A coincidence brought him to Croatia and the name of the coincidence is his wife Nada Putniković Mitransky, whose family come from the island. She is the connection between the painter and this part of the Adriatic. As a retired professor, Jürgen Mitransky enjoys the colours, light and atmosphere of his second home, the only place where he feels truly united with the elements of nature.

Text: Anita Travčić
English translation: Marija Mlinar