Gerda J Frömel
1931 - 1975
Place of BirthSchönberg, Czech Republic
Place of DeathBelmullet, County Mayo
BiographyGerda Frömel was born in Schonberg in Czechoslovakia in 1931. She studied sculpture, first in Stuttgart, where she was awarded the academy scholarship in 1949, and then in Darmstadt and Munich. Not wishing to return to her own country, she came to Ireland in 1956 and settled here with her German husband, Werner Schurmann, who was himself an able sculptor, before turning to opera singing as a career. Gerda Frömel brought the inheritance of a dual tradition to bear on all the work that she created in this country and it was here that all of her mature work was inspired. She was forty-five and the mother of four boys when, tragically, she lost her life in a drowning accident.When she first arrived to Ireland, Frömel began to contribute to various group shows, including the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. She worked initially in marble, onyx, slate, or alabaster, but later also in bronze, aluminium and gold. She excelled as both a carver and a modeller and was a fastidious craftsman, devoted to finish and technical perfection as the delicacy of her work suggests. One of her main concerns was with the intrinsic nature of the materials with which she worked. Her influences were Giacomette, Brancusi and perhaps Barbara Hepworth. Brancusi's work was the inspiration for her formal purity and simplicity as well as a certain mysterious primeval quality.
Very versatile, Frömel was able to slip from abstract to representational and from delicate, softly modelled or carved heads and figures to austere, almost bare, pieces. She was particularly fascinated with circular, oval and disc-shaped forms.
Towards the end of her life, she had expressed the desire to explore further the challenge of working on a larger scale and had begun to devote much time to large public commissions. Throughout her career, however, she continued to produce the intimate, contemplative pieces for which she is best known.
Frömel's sculpture of the 1960s, in particular, abounds with references to animals, birds, trees and streams. Some pieces even have titles like Landscape and little Pond. Another example of her work, entitled Waves, is also in the Collection.
Frömel's intuitive response to the qualities of her chosen medium, in this case bronze, forms a very important aspect of her work. She used a range of textural effects which make the sculpture look worn and vaguely ritualistic. The play of light on her sculptures is also of intrinsic importance.
In 1962 Frömel won the sculpture prize in the Irish Church Art Exhibition and the following year was awarded an Arts Council scholarship for sculpture. She had her first one-man show in Dublin in 1964. In 1970 she won the Waterford Glass Company Award at the Oireachtas. She won many other awards and received commissions from both Ireland and Germany including one for the P.J. Carroll building in Dundalk and the Regional Technical College in Galway.
