A Dresden painter on his travels

The artist Rainer Zille (1945-2005) studied from 1967 to 1972 at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Dresden Academy of Fine Arts) under Gerhard Kettner, Herbert Kunze and Franz Tippel. Since 1972, he has helped shape the cultural scene in Dresden as a freelance painter, graphic artist and founded the Galerie Nord in 1974 together with the artists Joachim Böttcher (1946-2022), Veit Hofmann (born 1944), Marlies Lilge (1945-1983), Stefan Plenkers (born 1945) and others. During the seventeen years of exhibition activity, the gallery managed by Sigrid Walther presented primarily paintings and sculptures by Dresden artists.

Rainer Zille had the opportunity to travel to Poland, Bulgaria and the USSR during the late 1970s and 1980s as part of study trips. Particularly memorable was a joint study trip with Stefan Plenkers and Veit Hofmann in 1980, which took them to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The work Teestube in Samarkand from 1981, which is now in the Kupferstich-Kabinett of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, exemplifies Zille's expressive processing of this trip: https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Details/Index/979345

Individual documents from Zille's estate, however, also show that some of his travel plans were rejected, including those to non-Socialist foreign countries.

In 2020, the Zille family opened the gallery Kunst vom Dachboden in Lohmen, to share the works as well as the art collection of Rainer Zille with the public: https://www.kunst-vom-dachboden.de/. In changing presentations, thematic focuses are set: the exhibition Künstlerpost. Ist das ein Brief oder was? (Is that a letter or what?) focuses on letters and postcards by East German artists from 1970-995, while the exhibition USA OST NORD WEST traces the journeys of Rainer Zille and other artists to the Soviet Union, Lapland and the USA between 1973-1994.