"Dancing with Hannes" Nr.8 Painting

Elias Maria Reti (born 04.04.1956 in Budapest) is of Jewish-Hungarian heritage. His great-grandfather was the Hungarian chess champion Richard Reti. His paternal grandfather, Simon Reti, was a Hungarian communist and, like his wife and the grandmother of Elias, murdered in Auschwitz. His father, Benjamin Reti hid with a farmer's family in Pecs and was so able to survive. When Elias Maria was six months old, the Hungarian People's Resistance broke out, where his father was a freedom fighter against the Soviet Union. After the rebellion, Elias' parents were killed as they tried to flee Hungary. In 1957 Elias Maria entered an orphanage in Munich. He was adopted the same year and renamed Elias Neumann. 1970 Elias Maria Reti worked along side his uncle Hannes Neumann in a circus, where he preformed in France and Italy among other places. During a show in France he met Pablo Picasso, who gave him a painting as a gift. On the 13th of November, 1971, Hannes Neumann fell to his death during his circus act. Before the end of the year Elias Maria began studying art under Prof. Joseph Beuys. When Joseph Beuys' position as a professor was terminated without notice by President of the German State Johannes Rau, Elias Maria Reti chose to move to the socialist GDR in protest. According to his own records, Elias Maria Reti worked on a collective farm (LPG) in Dresden from 1972 to 1974. In 1975 Elias Maria Reti returned to West Germany together with the polish actor Danuta Kolarska, to whom he was now married. The two emigrated to New York immediately. Until 1980 Reti lived with his wife in New York, where he came into contact with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. In 1980 he returned to the BRD and lived at first in Cologne. The painting style he developed in New York received much attention in Cologne and especially influenced the work of Cologne artists Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil to copy it. From this came the casual painting style that went down in art history as the "Neue Wilde". In 1984 Reti was invited to an exhibition in the DDR, which he attended with his wife. A few days later, Danuta Kolarska was found dead in a hotel in East Berlin and Elias was arrested by the East German state security. Until 1999 Elias Maria Reti lived in an East Berlin jail. After his release in 1999 he was admitted to a psychiatric clinic where he stayed until 2008.