Ger Lataster
1920–2012 · Dutch painter of the informal art movement
Ger Lataster (Schaesberg, 1920 – Amsterdam, 2012) was a Dutch painter associated with informal art. The son of a miner, he trained in Maastricht and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, and spent some time in Paris in the 1950s. His colourful, expressive abstract paintings were linked to the Cobra group and, to a lesser extent, to the Zero movement, though he always preferred to remain independent of any organised movement.
Willem Sandberg, director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, championed his work from the 1950s, and the museum gave him a solo exhibition in 1972. He took part in documenta II in Kassel in 1959 and, in 1963, co-founded with other artists the alternative academy Ateliers '63. In 1983 he became professor of painting at the Rijksakademie.
His best-known works include Children Playing (1954), Everyone's Ashes (1976) and the monumental ceiling painting Atlantic Icarus, painted for the Mauritshuis in 1987–1988. His paintings are held by museums such as the Stedelijk, the Bonnefantenmuseum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2020, on the centenary of his birth, a dual retrospective was held in Maastricht, and he is regarded as one of the most prominent Dutch painters of his generation.