Waldemar Grzimek – sculptor and ceramist
The multi-talented artist and lecturer works intensively with Hedwig Bollhagen. Due to its extensive orders for the special construction staff of the GDR, the HB workshops are also involved in renowned projects with their building and garden ceramics.
Waldemar Grzimek (* December 5, 1918 in Rastenburg, East Prussia; † May 26, 1984 in West Berlin) a.o. sculptor and ceramist, studied stonemasonry at the Philipp Holzmann AG at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. Thanks to Charles Crodel, in 1946 he got a teaching position at the art school in Halle at Burg Giebichenstein. Waldemar Grzimek came to Hedwig Bollhagen in Marwitz in 1951: He was looking for a workshop for a series ceramic product.
The pleasure of working in clay and the technique of incising drawing fascinate the sculptor just as much as the painter Charles Crodel, who 20 years earlier, together with Hedwig Bollhagen, had laid the foundations of building ceramics in Marwitz. Through his activities, Grzimek provides the HB workshops with sustainable, secure orders and public reputation, especially in building and garden ceramics. When residences and embassies for western representations were made available in East Berlin in the 1970s, the garden walls, room dividers and shaped stones came from the HB workshops. Marwitz was also involved in the forest settlement of the Politburo in Wandlitz.
From 1948 to 1951 he received a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg, later he taught at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. Although he was entrusted with important monument commissions and was decorated with GDR national prizes, he left his homeland on the day the Wall was built. Nevertheless, he remains a member of the Academy of the GDR. Until his appointment as a professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt in 1967, Waldemar Grzimek worked as a freelance artist in Berlin and Friedrichshafen.