Gerda Frömel
Gerda Frömel was born in Schonberg in the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia) in 1931. She studied sculpture, first in Stuttgart, where she was awarded the academy scholarship in 1949, and then in Darmstadt and Munich. She came to Ireland in 1956 and settled here with her German husband, Werner Schurmann also a sculptor, before turning to opera singing as a career. She was forty-five and a mother of four boys when, tragically, she lost her life in a drowning accident.
Her influences were Giacomette and Brancusi, whose work was the inspiration for her formal purity and simplicity as well as a certain mysterious primeval quality. When she first arrived to Ireland, Frömel began to contribute to various group shows, including the Irish Exhibition of Living Art.
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 for ‘Sails’ and the Regional Technical College in Galway.
Gerda Frömel was a versatile artist, she was interested with circular and oval shaped dorms and her work ranged from delicate and softly modelled to severe, bare pieces. She worked initially in marble, onyx, slate, or alabaster, but later also in bronze, aluminium and gold. 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 great importance.
