Roger David Servais

Roger David Servais spent his childhood in Liège, Brussels and Berlin. In 1961 he began his studies of painting and design at the School of Art in West Berlin. When the Soviet sector became segregated by the Berlin Wall, he married his girlfriend Waltraud Kolbow who lived in the eastern part of the city and they moved to Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg (East Berlin). In 1965 their daughter Marguerite was born. As citizen of Belgium he was free to travel and he commuted between Brussels and Berlin, but he endured reprisals from the East German government. His art was prohibited to go on exhibition. He made use of his talents by designing book covers for publishers. By intervention of Baudouin of Belgium, his wife and daughter were allowed to leave the German Democratic Republic in 1973 and settle in Belgium. In 1974 Roger Davis Servais continued his studies of art at West Berlin's School of Arts, which, in 1963, he had been forced to intermit. His most influential teacher was Otto Hofmann, a former pupil of the Bauhaus. In 1979 he became a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund. In the 1980s Roger David Servais worked in Belgium, France, Israel, New York City, Sweden and Italy. From 1990 onwards he joined the painter and civil rights activist Bärbel Bohley in her quest to shed light upon oppression and instrumentalization of the arts in the GDR. They both initiated Klaus Schröder's und Hannelore Offner's book Eingegrenzt – Ausgegrenzt: Bildende Kunst und Parteiherrschaft in der DDR 1961-1989 (Limited - Excluded: Art and the Party's Control inside the GDR between 1961 and 1989) published by Berliner Akademie Verlag in 2000. After the death of his wife he married Tosca Schmalenberg in 1998. He lives and works in Berlin and Southern France.

Roger David Servais (born in 1942 in Liège, Belgium) is a Belgian painter, graphic artist, sculptor and designer