About the work
“When one starts painting again after more than a quarter of a century, one can’t simply pick up where one left off”, confesses the artist, who once again returned to painting on canvas in 1991.
Simple geometric forms, squares, rectangles, lozenges, triangles, often in rhythmic rows, provide the formal skeleton of his new paintings, which the artist refers to as Chromatische Konstellationen (Chromatic Constellations). Their only pictorial themes are colour and light. The strict pictorial geometry is juxtaposed with loosely applied colours and dissolving, fraying contours, which rhythmically permeate each other with a loose brush application. Here too, where green and turquoise, yellow and orange, red and pink, punctuated by the light white of the canvas, combine to form a harmonious colour tone.
“The Chromatic Constellations”, the artist writes, “which arise while painting, follow an inner idea; one which I am prepared to abandon immediately when the existing painting calls upon me to follow it, and not vice versa. Ideally it is not me alone who paints, because the painting also paints itself. This is part of the phenomenology of the existence of angels.”
Text authored and provided by Dr. Doris Hansmann, Art historian
Studies of art history, theater, film and television, English and Romance Languages at the University of Cologne, doctorated in 1994. Research assistant at the Art Museum Düsseldorf. Lecturer and project manager at Wienand Verlag, Cologne. Freelance work as an author, editor and book producer for publishers and museums in Germany and abroad. From 2011 chief editor at Wienand Verlag, from 2019 to 2021 senior editor at DCV, Dr. Cantz’sche Verlagsgesellschaft, Berlin. Numerous publications on the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
