Befreiung durch Materie

The series “BUNTE STEINE” (Colorful Stones) is dedicated to the author and painter Adalbert Stifter. The first triptych of this series: “BUNTE STEINE. SCHICHT. SCHICHT. SCHICHT. HIMMELSSÄULE I, II and III” was created solely from the minerals that feature in the titles of the stories in Adalbert Stifter’s “Bunte Steine”: granite, limestone, tourmaline, rock crystal, cat silver, and mountain milk. The further development of this series is not limited to these minerals alone but delights in the manifold richness of nature. All materials used are pounded into pigments in a brass mortar with endless blows, from which the paintings then emerge. As a binding agent, the artist reaches back to the oldest glue in human history: hide glue.

The artist wishes to return to the emerging themes: the Great and the Small. They are, from the artist’s perspective, the drive and starting point of art itself. It is the artist’s concern to lead himself and his surroundings, through his artistic exhaustion, away from the Small toward the Great. For: the lightning, the thunderstorm, or the earthquake alone seize the gaze of the “[…] uninformed and inattentive, while the intellectual pursuit of the researcher goes primarily toward the whole and the general, and only in it alone can recognize greatness, because it alone sustains the world. The details pass, and their effects are barely recognizable after a short time” (Stifter, 1994)

All phenomena that pass—that is, everything perceivable, everything that is form—represent the Small. The Great, the consciousness that lies beneath the layers of these coming and going trivialities, is that which we strive for, that which ultimately satisfies us, and that which we truly are. To see and live this truthfully and all-encompassingly is, for the artist, the highest good. Nothing matches the fulfillment thereof; nothing can take this fulfillment away.