NESCH, ROLF

born Jan. 7, 1893, Oberesslingen, Ger. died Oct. 28, 1975, Oslo GermanNorwegian printmaker, one of the first artists to use metal collage in printmaking, thereby producing heavily embossed graphics. Nesch was educated in Dresden, Ger., but fled to Norway as a political refugee in 1933 after his art had been labeled degenerate by the Nazi regime. He originally studied under E.L. Kirchner, and he worked successively in Expressionist, Surrealist, and abstract formats. Nesch's methods of attaching metal strips of soldering wire to the printing plate to produce embossed graphics, which he developed in the 1930s, eventually led him to make mosaic constructions using metal, wood, and coloured glass and stones affixed to the plate, which then itself became a work of art.