(b St Tönis, nr Krefeld, Oct 8, 1954). German photographer, sculptor and painter. He studied from 1971 to 1977 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Joseph Beuys and from 1979 to 1981 was a member of the Cologne artists’ group Mülheimer Freiheit, which he co-founded with the artist Jiři Georg Dokoupil. His early exposure included his participation in Documenta 7 (Kassel, 1982) and the exhibition Zeitgeist (W. Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau, 1982), where he achieved recognition with Neo-Expressionist works of the late 1970s and early 1980s, vigorous and brightly coloured paintings that were part of a wider return to expressive figuration. He broadened his range of media in the mid-1980s to include photography and screenprinting as part of a general questioning of the value and pre-eminence of painting. At the same time his work became more political, addressing specific issues such as race and the relationship between first- and third-world societies. Still based in Cologne, in 1990 he co-founded the group Unternehmen Wirtschaft und Kunst–erweitert (‘Enterprise Economy and Art–Expanded’), a movement strongly influenced by the social commitment advocated by Beuys and continuing his ecological activism. In the mid-1990s he produced a series of miniature reconstructions of houses, based on photographs taken by the American photographer Walker Evans of rural homesteads in the American South....