Born in Dortmund, Germany, Norbert Tadeusz studied under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art from 1961 to 1966. His preference for figurative painting did not mesh with the conceptual approach that he found in Düsseldorf and it was not until he moved away to West Berlin that he felt at home with his own proclivities. He “was a intuitive painter,” said Bernhard Zunkeler who organized the artist’s first one-man US show in 2015 at the El Segundo Museum of Art in California, “right from the heart, fighting for the colors.” He is sometimes grouped with the German Neo-Expressionist or Neue Wilden artists of the 1980s, although he was not formally part of the movement. Like Tadeusz, the Neo-Expressionists reacted against the dematerialised art of the ‘60s and ‘70s by painting with bright colors and dramatic, distorted figuration. Between 1973 and 2003 he taught at the State Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, the College of Fine Arts in Berlin and the College of Fine Arts in Braunschweig.
