In 1976 Hubertus Giebe (b. 1953 in Dohna near Dresden) had himself struck from the rolls at his own request - "on account of too much Socialist Realism." That independence runs through his entire body of work: large-format, multi-figure history paintings in an expressive manner, peopled with shop-window mannequins, angels, mythic heroes and literary figures, with Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and Pablo Picasso as his models. He completed his studies in 1978 with an external diploma in Leipzig as a master student of Bernhard Heisig, and first drew wide notice with forty etchings for a bibliophile edition of Günter Grass's "The Tin Drum." International attention came above all with his solo exhibition "Geschichtsbilder" at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990. Giebe lives and works in Dresden and handed his archive to the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 2012.