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Gerda Frömel was born in Schonberg in Czechoslovakia in 1931. She studied sculpture
first at Stuttgart where she was awarded the academy scholarship in 1949 and then in
Darmstadt and Munich. Not wishing to return to her own country, she came to Ireland
in 1956 and settled here with her German husbandWerner Schurmann who was him-
self an able sculptor before turning to opera singing as a career. Gerda Frömel brought
the inheritance of a dual tradition to bear on all the work that she created in this coun-
try and it was here that all of her mature work was inspired. She was forty-five and the
mother of four boys when, tragically, she lost her life in a drowning accident.When she
first arrived in Ireland, Frömel began to contribute to various group shows, including the
Irish Exhibition of Living Art. She worked initially in marble, onyx, slate or alabaster, but
later also in bronze, aluminium and gold. She excelled as both a carver and a modeller
and was a fastidious craftsman, devoted to finish and technical perfection as the delicacy
of her work suggests.
One of her main concerns was with the intrinsic nature of the materials with which she
worked.Very versatile, Frömel was able to slip from abstract to representational and
from delicate, softly modelled or carved heads and figures to austere, almost bare pieces.
She was particularly fascinated with circular, oval and disc-shaped forms. Latterly, she
had expressed the desire to further explore the challenge of large scale pieces and had
begun to devote much time to large public commissions. In 1962 she 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 theWaterford 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 and the Regional Technical College in Galway.
Fig. 46. Gerda Frömel
