Ewald Mataré

Ewald Mataré was born on 25 February 1887 in Burtscheid, Aachen, Germany. He received a humanist secondary education at the Staatliches Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, then began formal art studies in 1907 at the Preußische Akademie der Künste (Prussian Academy of Arts) in Berlin, studying under Julius Ehrentraut, Lovis Corinth, and Arthur Kampf. No specific degree or diploma is documented in available sources.

Mataré worked across painting and, increasingly through his career, sculpture, developing a reduced, stylized figuration most identified with his animal subjects, especially cows rendered in bronze and wood. He received the Silver Medal of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1914 and went on to accumulate a string of West German honors after the war, including the Thorn-Prikker Prize of the city of Krefeld in 1952, the Großer Kunstpreis of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1953, a gold medal at the Milan Triennial in 1955, the Stefan Locher Medal of the city of Cologne in 1957, and the Großes Verdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1958. His reported participation in documenta I, in 1955, and documenta II, in 1959, both in Kassel, placed him among artists West German curators considered central to the period.

Mataré was appointed professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1932 and lived and worked in nearby Büderich, now part of Meerbusch, until his death there from a pulmonary embolism on 28 March 1965.

Institutional attention to Mataré has remained steady rather than spiking, anchored by recurring museum exhibitions of his animal sculptures. Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin mounted "Nothing Without Nature: Ewald Mataré's Animal Sculptures" in 2025, and the Ernst Barlach Haus in Hamburg followed with its own version of the same exhibition in 2026, both drawing on holdings including Museum Kurhaus Kleve's collection of his cow sculptures. His reported participation in documenta I and II placed him, in the 1950s, among the artists West German curators considered central to the postwar reconstruction of the country's art identity. Gallery Ludorff in Düsseldorf continues to place his work with collectors and museums, including a spring 2026 acquisitions show, evidence of a market that is active if specialized.

Mataré's auction market runs largely through German and European houses rather than New York or London evening sales. His best documented auction result is Brunnenfigur Stehende Kuh, a fountain figure of a standing cow, reported by Lempertz and by market press as selling for EUR 352,800 including premium, equivalent to about USD 410,600 as reported at the time; the exact sale date could not be confirmed from available sources. Some 2026 auction reporting references a further, higher-profile sale of a Mataré cow bronze, but the price and date of that sale are not independently confirmed, so this profile continues to cite the EUR 352,800 result pending verification. Artprice's database lists numerous auction results for the artist across his career, indicating a market with meaningful depth of supply even though top prices remain modest compared with his documenta-era contemporaries. Other cow sculptures have placed among his strongest results, with several results in the low six figures at houses including Lempertz, Ketterer Kunst, and Grisebach.

No published catalogue raisonne has been confirmed for Mataré, so provenance and authentication rest on his estate, managed by Museum Kurhaus Kleve, and on the auction houses and dealers most active in his market, principally Lempertz and Galerie Ludorff. His best documented auction result sits in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars, well below many of his documenta-era peers, and results are concentrated in Germany, so US dollar figures reflect currency conversion rather than a like-for-like domestic sale. Collectors should also expect some inconsistency in how his name appears across market platforms: the authoritative spelling is Ewald Mataré, with the accent, though many auction and data platforms render it as Ewald Matare.