LIFE AND WORK

Robert Ortlieb (1925–2011) was an accomplished American artist from Southern California. His work demonstrates an authoritative mastery of human form, with an abstract and modernist sensibility, expressed in an expanse of materials — stone, bronze, rare wood, terracotta, and plexiglass.

Highlights of his six-decade career include:

• Five-time winner of the prestigious California Art Club Juried Exhibition for Sculpture

• Exhibited by more than 80 museums and galleries in the U.S. and abroad

• Public installations in prominent universities, civic centers, and houses of worship throughout Southern California and beyond

APPRENTICESHIP

Ortlieb received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California (USC), studying sculpture under Robert Merrell Gage and drawing and painting under Francis de Erdely.

Following graduate school, he traveled throughout Mexico and South America, introducing him to the primitive and megalithic artwork of the region. He then journeyed to Europe where he engrossed himself in Michelangelo's stone sculpture along with the wood carvings of German Renaissance masters.

EXPRESSION IN FORM

Ortlieb's work transcended traditional artistic taxonomy. Renowned author Norman Corwin observed:

Ortlieb makes a solid virtue of passion regardless of modes, media, substance, and treatment; that he charges his materials with so much energy and emotion that they breathe, swirl, rise, fall, and replicate; that with uncommon vigor he compounds pain, ecstasy, tension, and mystery. Not the least astonishing aspect of Ortlieb is his versatility. I am aware of no other painter or sculptor, including some of the most notable of the past or present, who exceeds his range or expresses as many moods or emotions.

In addition to sculpture, Ortlieb produced an extensive body of drawings using India ink and colored pencils. Some of his earlier sketches touched on biblical and mythological themes. And in the 1970s and 1980s this work manifested in dozens of fantastical renderings on outer space and alien beings, which he titled Etheric Visions.