Rainer Fetting

Rainer Fetting was born on 31 December 1949 in Wilhelmshaven, West Germany. Between 1969 and 1972 he trained as a carpenter while also working as a stage-design trainee at the Landesbuhne in Wilhelmshaven, an early apprenticeship in building and materials that later informed his approach to painting and sculpture. From 1972 to 1978 he studied painting at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin under Professor Hans Jaenisch, becoming his Meisterschuler, or master student.

In 1977, while still a student, Fetting co-founded Galerie am Moritzplatz in Berlin with fellow artists including Salome, Helmut Middendorf, and Bernd Zimmer, a self-organized space that became a center for the city's new expressive painting. From 1978 to 1979 he held a DAAD scholarship that took him to New York, a period that exposed him to the city's skyline and street life, both of which became recurring subjects in his work alongside his paintings of the Berlin Wall.

His international profile rose quickly through the early 1980s: he was included in A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1981, and in Zeitgeist at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, in 1982. Later in the decade his work appeared in An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1984, and in Refigured Painting: The German Image 1960 to 1988 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1988. Beyond painting, Fetting is also known for public sculpture commissions, including a bronze statue of Willy Brandt installed in the atrium of the Willy-Brandt-Haus in Berlin and the sculpture created for the Henri Nannen Prize, first awarded in 2005. As of 2026 he continues to live and work between Berlin and New York.

Fetting is consistently described in museum and gallery literature as one of the central figures of the Neue Wilde and of the broader neo-expressionist revival in German painting from the late 1970s onward. Institutions have repeatedly framed him as a chronicler of Berlin during the Wall era, and his rapid inclusion in landmark international group shows, the Royal Academy in 1981, MoMA in 1984, and the Guggenheim in 1988, is treated as evidence of how quickly his generation of German painters gained international standing. Retrospective attention has continued steadily, including a major solo exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie in 2011 and a comprehensive presentation of his painting and sculpture at the Dortmunder U in 2021. No verbatim assessment from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed in current research; institutional texts describe him in general terms as one of Germany's most important contemporary artists, without attributing that language to a specific journalist.

Fetting's market runs primarily through galleries, with a comparatively small and infrequent public auction record for an artist of his historical standing. The highest publicly documented auction result identified in current research is Mauer am Sudstern (1988), which Heritage Auctions' own market summary states sold for USD 194,000 on 31 May 2008, describing it as the most ever paid for a Fetting painting at auction. That figure is single-sourced to Heritage's summary and has not been independently cross-verified against a second auction database, so it should be treated as the best-documented result available rather than a fully confirmed, cross-checked all-time record.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Fetting, so provenance and attribution should be checked against gallery and museum documentation rather than a single reference catalogue. His current market activity appears concentrated with a small number of German galleries, notably Galerie Herold and Galerie Thomas Fuchs, based on ongoing exhibition programming rather than any published, explicit representation statement. Public auction results remain limited in number, and the best-documented auction high, USD 194,000 for Mauer am Sudstern (1988) in 2008, comes from a single source, which means it should be read as provisional pending further, independent verification.