Oskar Nerlinger

German Oskar Nerlinger worked as a painter and graphic artist under the pseudonym “Nilgreen.” After his education in Strasbourg, he studied in Berlin and later resided there after his deployment in World War I. In the 1920s, he represented an abstract-constructivist trend in his drawings, collages, murals, and commercial graphics.

As a member of the Communist Party, he was not allowed to exhibit when the Nazis seized power in Germany and was imprisoned for some time. After World War II, Nerlinger moved to the GDR in 1951, after he was removed from his duties as a university teacher in West Berlin for political reasons. In East Germany, he represented Socialist Realism.

Possibly the submitted works belong to the so-called photograms, with which he and his wife Alice Lex-Nerlinger (1893-1975) experimented in the 1920s. Part of a series of six pictures from the years 1925-1928 is the Motorcycle. They were not printed until the 1990s by their son. The Tennis-player is part of the montage Poor and Rich from 1930.