Nikolaus Gerhart

Nikolaus Gerhart was born on 30 November 1944 in Starnberg, Bavaria, and grew up in Munich, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He first completed an apprenticeship as a stonemason and stone sculptor.

From 1969 to 1975 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under the sculptor Georg Brenninger and became his master student. The lower pediment of the Munich National Theatre had been destroyed in the Second World War, and in 1972 it was replaced by a modern figure group by Brenninger, on which several of his students, Gerhart among them, worked.

Stone was Gerhart's material throughout his career, with only occasional excursions into drawing. He worked mainly in granite, basalt lava and limestone, cutting, splitting and hollowing blocks, sometimes down to a fragile rim, so that the hidden interior of the stone became visible. The Süddeutsche Zeitung described his aim as drawing out the living qualities he believed were contained in the stone, and quoted him as saying that stone was for him not dead matter but nature, growth and life.

He received the Schwabing Art Prize of the City of Munich in 1973, a Bavarian state fellowship at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1977, the Munich Prize for the Visual Arts in 1983 and a working grant from the city of Budapest in 1992. In 1978 and 1979 he was the first visual arts fellow of the Märkische Kulturkonferenz in Lüdenscheid, chosen by a jury that included the painter Gerhard Richter.

His work appeared in group exhibitions including Von hier aus in Düsseldorf in 1984, the survey of art in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1945 to 1985 at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1985 and Skulptur begreifen at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover in 1989. Solo shows included the Städtische Galerie Lüdenscheid and the Städtische Galerie Göppingen in 1992.

Gerhart's sculptures stand in many public places. Among them are an untitled work of 1986 on the Strasse der Skulpturen in St. Wendel, Kern und Hülle (1986 to 1989) in the Im Tal sculpture park in the Westerwald, Horizontale-Vertikale (1988) in the sculpture park of Schloss Philippsruhe in Hanau, and Durchbrochene Steine und liegende Quader (1995) at a student residence in Regensburg.

In Munich his works include the opened stone sculpture at the Gasteig, Geöffnete Granite II (1992) outside the European Patent Office on Bayerstrasse and the large sculpture Ort der Weltreligionen (2005) in the Riem landscape park. In Lüdenscheid the city bought his Komposition mit Keil, a block of Finnish granite, in 1978; when it was moved during building work in 2009 without his involvement he came to the town to help choose a new site. The town also has his bridge of greywacke from 1979 and the monumental granite Zwei geöffnete Rundschnitte of 1990.

Altars and other liturgical furnishings formed an important part of his work. An example highlighted in his obituary is the altar, ambo and font in Kelheim limestone he made for the renovated St Oswald's Church in Traunstein in 2020.

In 1998 Gerhart was appointed professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he had studied. He was remembered as a popular teacher who gave his students great freedom to follow their own ideas and techniques, took them on excursions to look critically at art in Munich's public spaces, and rarely intervened in their decisions about form.

From 2004 he led the academy as rector, a title later changed to president. His term covered the academy's 200th anniversary in 2008, the completion of a full renovation of its building and a wave of student protests. With Walter Grasskamp and Florian Matzner he wrote the extensive history 200 Jahre Akademie der Bildenden Künste München (2008). He retired on reaching retirement age at the end of March 2010 and was succeeded by his deputy, the photographer Dieter Rehm.

Gerhart was elected to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 2004 and was a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung published an obituary by Andreas Kühne on 13 October 2026 reporting that Nikolaus Gerhart had died in Munich at the age of 81. The exact date of death was not given in the first reports, and German Wikipedia records it as on or before 13 October 2026. The cause of death has not been made public.

On 17 October the Lüdenscheid paper Lüdenscheider Nachrichten (come-on.de) recalled his close ties to the town. His friend, the collector Klaus Crummenerl, said the art world had lost an important sculptor whom many in Lüdenscheid would remember as an open and jovial conversation partner and a loyal friend.

Gerhart's sculptures remain in public spaces in Munich, Lüdenscheid, Hanau, Regensburg, St. Wendel, the Westerwald and elsewhere, as well as in churches such as St Oswald's in Traunstein. As professor and then head of the Munich academy for more than a decade, he also shaped a generation of students, and he co-wrote the academy's bicentenary history.