Horst Ademeit
Horst Ademeit
Horst Ademeit
Born in Cologne in 1937, Horst Ademeit was a trained craftsman who worked odd jobs and lived a significant part of his life in a low-income housing project, ill, paranoid, and immersed in legal proceedings concerning fees that he owed and complaints that he filed. Although he had attended Joseph Beuys’s open-door class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1970, Ademeit did not find support for the work that he was producing, and subsequently ceased fine-art training. In fact, the Polaroid photographs, journals, and handwritten notes that comprise Ademeit’s first museum exhibition, curated by Udo Kittelmann and Claudia Dichter, were not conceived as artworks; they have been valued as such only since 2008, when they were brought to the attention of Galerie Susanne Zander in Cologne by the staff of the nursing home where Ademeit was then living, but from that point until his death from cancer in 2010, Ademeit embraced this categorization.
