Raffael Rheinsberg

Born in Kiel in 1943 and based in Berlin from 1979, he was an installation and object artist who built his practice around found industrial materials gathered from scrapyards, factory halls, and derelict urban sites. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the subject became central to his work; he followed the material traces of East German society, including a series of 45 handmade hydrant covers from GDR factories, each distinct as a record of workers' reality. He received the German Critics Prize in 1984 and the Art Prize of the State of Schleswig-Holstein in 1994. He died in 2016.