Hans Joachim Breustedt is a Bauhaus painter. Born in Thuringia, he was a master student of Lyonel Feininger in Weimar and adhered to the Bauhaus teachings throughout his life. Even as a young painter, he discovered Italy for his life and his art during long stays in the country. He shared his love of the Mediterranean world with like-minded artist friends, above all Werner Gilles. On the other hand, Breustert's biography is essentially characterised by contemporary events: as a freelance painter living in Weimar, he was banned from working, his pre-war work was destroyed as a result of the war and he lost his first wife. After the war, he came to Upper Austria through friends from his student days and became an Austrian citizen. In the early 1950s, he married Margret Bilger and lived in Taufkirchen an der Pram, even
after her death in 1971. From the 1960s onwards, he spent the winters with his daughter from his first marriage in Switzerland. Breustedt, who became a member of the Vienna Art Club and the Upper Austrian artists' group MAERZ after the war, led a reclusive creative life. A few representative solo exhibitions, for example at the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz and the Oberösterreichische Landesgalerie, gave the public a greater insight into his work during his lifetime. He was involved in the travelling Bauhaus exhibition in Europe and America from 1969 to 1971. Together with Werner Gilles and his wife Margret Bilger, he exhibited several times with Günther Franke in Munich. In 1978, the Austrian state awarded him the title of professor. Hans Joachim Breustedt saw himself exclusively as a painter. His mostly small formats range between suggestive, more or less abstract representationalism (heads, figures, stilllifes, landscapes) and abstract works that contain geometric elements and are often simply labelled as compositions. For biographical reasons, the majority of the surviving works date from after the war. Only one portfolio with sketches, work notes, watercolours and ink drawings from the pre-war period and his time as a soldier has survived by chance. It was found in the attic during the renovation of the Bilger house. Breustedt's daughter Marysia Breustedt donated a substantial part of this portfolio to the Upper Austrian Provincial Museum, which documented the donation in a catalogue book. Hans Joachim Breustedt usually sketched his pictorial ideas with ink and brush on small pieces of paper. It was not until the 1960s that he began to formulate these sketches into monochrome drawings. Thus, at his age, a special body of work emerged that is
stylistically close to Tachism and East Asian ink brush drawings. (Source: https://
www.bilger-breustedt.at/breustedt/)