Maria Latzke is a German artist and mural painter. International media refer to him as one of the leading representative of this art form. The Russian Art Federation lists him in their ranking amongst the world best painters of the last four centuries.

Rainer Maria Latzke was born 1950 in a small village in the Eifel mountains as the fifth of nine children of an art teacher couple. Like his brothers and sisters, he began to learn about painting and drawing at earliest age. He spent his childhood in a chaotic, artistically influenced parent´s home in which “the children could earlier paint than speak”, how he described it once.

After high school he studied art at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and the Dusseldorf Art Academy with Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter. He finished his studies with the title of a Master Student and Master degrees in art, philosophy and pedagogy. After studying, however, with his realistically painted works he met with disapproval in the then galleries scene. In order to finance his life, he took a position as an art teacher at a grammar school in his hometown. Shortly before he was taken over into an official status he quit and went to Italy to continue his studies of the art of the Renaissance. After experiencing the surreal effect of the murals in the villas and palaces, which allowed one “to enter the virtual worlds behind the walls”, he devoted himself to the rediscovery of the painting techniques of this lost art. After finishing his studies, he returned to Germany and made with his at that time unique art style.an international career.

In 1986, he acquired the castle Thal in Belgium, where he set up his studio and an experimental workshop for new painting techniques. In 2000, he received a patent for the first digital production process of individually adaptable wall paintings. While original works by Rainer Maria Latzke cost up to six-figure sums and therefore are only accessible only to a few, his Frescographies opened this art form to a a wider audience.

Latzke’s works adorn walls in buildings throughout the world, such as the City Hall of Vienna, Royal Palaces in the United Arab Emirates, luxury hotels like the Ciragan Palace in Istanbul and the Royal Clipper, the world´s largest sailing ship. His clients include Mercedes Benz, Maserati and the German rock band ‘The Scorpions’. International media as Herald Tribune called him a “Modern Michelangelo” and the Forbes magazine ranked him as one of the most influential painters of the 1990s decade. In 2006 Latzke was appointed a Professor at the Utah State University in the United States. There he founded the Institute of Frescography (IOF), a research institution for modern mural painting techniques. In 2010 he was invited by the Chinese higher education authorities to bring classic European mural painting to China and taught at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts. In 2010 he received a Honorary Professorship of the Fudan University, one of the three leading Universities in China.

In 2017, on his European estate Monte-a-Lago near Granada in Spain, he set up a private art academy, which, according to the principles of the Renaissance, offers a cross-curricular education of the creative human abilities.