Born in Berlin in 1947, he graduated from high school in 1967, then studied industrial design at the Berlin College of Fine Arts under Professor Herbert Kaufmann. In 1974, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kassel. Gunter Deming is the creator and creator of the STOLPERSTEINE tile.
“For years, the artist has been commemorating the absence of Jews murdered during the Holocaust in European cities. His Stolpersteine are a beautiful, discreet, and moving form of remembrance. A passerby on the street stumbles upon a tiny brass plaque with a name and information about the place of deportation and their subsequent fate. Being in this place unleashes the imagination, and that person—pulled from that home, foreboding death, gazing with despair at their loved ones, suffering for themselves and others, humiliated, utterly powerless—permeates our sensibilities. And it plunges us into a sense of bitter helplessness, because history refuses to redress the wrongs. These “stones of remembrance” transform into symbols of the victims of the Holocaust. The artist—modestly—never signs the plaques.”
– Maria Anna Potocka, “Art Wants to Be Everywhere,” Austeria Publishing House, 2025, p. 106.
