Clippings / Assorted Press (PDF 7956K)

Clippings / Assorted Press (PDF 7956K)

Tim Walsh: Painting of uncertain places,
This is tomorrow. Contemporary Art Magazine, 09/2012.
this is tomorrow - Painting of Uncertain Places
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Contemporary Art Magazine
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Steinernes Haus am Römerberg, Markt 44, 60311 Frankfurt am Main, 10 Sep 2012
Painting of Uncertain Places
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< 1 / 12 >
Artist : Tilo Baumgartel
Title : Der Sturm
Date(s) : 2008
Dimensions : 210x350 cm
Material : Oil on canvas
Website : www.fkv.de
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Credit : Courtesy Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, Dauerleihgabe Sammlung Ültzen,
Bremen Photo: Uwe Walter, Berlin; © Tilo Baumgärtel und galerieKleindienst
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Painting of Uncertain Places
Review by Tim Walsh
In 2003, Frankfurter Kunstverein presented the work of fifty young German painters in the
exhibition ʻDeutschemalereizweitausenddrei.ʼ The show aimed to represent a generationʼs
new optimism for a traditional medium, as well as the varied influences the works invoked.
In the accompanying press release a move ʻback to paintingʼ in Germany was referenced,
alongside the mediumʼs ongoing social concerns – its capacity for political subversion and
ʻhistorical potential for critique and reflection.ʼ[1] What this show recognised was that
painting lived brightest when powered by multiple influences and concerns – which
ultimately fuels good art. It also recognised that the market and the work could no longer be
untethered – some of the most powerful and political German paintings have achieved in
both the market and the mind. We need only think of Anselm Kieferʼs ʻSulamithʼ (1983) or
Gerhard Richterʼs ʻOctober 18, 1977ʼ series (1988) to understand the sort of social and fiscal
fusion paintings with an emotional core can achieve.
Some sixty artists or so exhibited in ʻDeutschemalereizweitausenddrei,ʼ with big names of
today like Katharina Grosse and Corinne Wasmuht, hiding in the ranks at the time. Flash
forward almost ten years, and the Frankfurter Kuntsverein is staging another survey
exhibition focusing on contemporary painting. Beyond this premise, ʻMalerei Der
Ungewissen Gegendenʼ (ʻPainting of Uncertain Placesʼ) 2012 shares little in common. Only
four artists are shown – Tilo Baumgärtel, Susanne Kühn, Antje Majewski and Hannes
Michanek – and each present figurative paintings that depict moody, isolated and
despondent worlds.
The opening works depict a vacuum of blue sky and pastoral landscapes by Frankfurt-based
Hannes Michanek. In ʻFleshclouds (The discovery of indistinct enlargements and
obviousness of things)ʼ (2008), we see a suited boy or young man, squatting in the crevasse
of a toy-like countryside. Dwarfed by the immense presence of the figure, houses puff
smoke from small chimneys; in the windows scenes play out discordant to outside. In the
foreground, minute people stand apart indifferently. In ʻWarm milk (foam ghosts)ʼ (2011)
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13.01.14 14:27
this is tomorrow - Painting of Uncertain Places
http://www.thisistomorrow.info/viewArticle.aspx?artId=1458
Michanek succeeds more by widening the scale and complicating his composition – dark
skies, and the orb of a full moon breaking through parted storm clouds, help to push the
mood to a spookier level.
Leipzig-based and Arno Rink-taught Tilo Baumgärtel presents a mixture of large canvases,
as well as charcoal, pastel and ink drawings. ʻDer Sturmʼ (2008) takes pride of place and is
a nice example of Baumgärtelʼs talent for creating dark and complex works. We look
outwards from the husk of a modernist pavilion – paint peels from raw concrete walls, light
from a single bulb illuminates dry grasses and strewn rubbish on the floor. In the corner two
figures huddle together, one with a lit cigar pressed to his mouth. At the edge of the room a
hooded figure sits with a dog, looking outwards as bolts of lightning strike the horizon. We
witness a scene of urban collapse; disorder seems to rule. Small scenes play out across the
picture, but never appear interrelated or dependent. This incoherence unsettles the viewer,
destabilising any clear narratives and generating a sense of the uncanny. In ʻDie
Nachtwacheʼ (2011) a naked, red-glowing figure perches on top of a tree stump with a
conquistador helmet on his head. At his feet, two naked figures appear to either fight or
fornicate. Stray animals lurk at the edge of the light, circling the central scene with lit eyes.
Works like these recall that of Nigel Cooke, riffing off his ability to disperse focus across the
picture plane: multiple scenes exist within the same composition, vying for attention.
Based in Freiburg (but taught too in Leipzig like Baumgärtel), Susanne Kühnʼs work mixes
alpine scenery with interiors that directly reference the rigid perspectives of Northern
Renaissance painters like Jan van Eyck and Jan Vermeer. In Kühnʼs canvases,
contemporary figures (generally youths with gloomy faces and dressed in street wear) stand
in the foreground, enveloped by twisting and breaking geometries. Kühn seems particularly
taken with van Eyckʼs ʻThe Arnolfini Portraitʼ (1434): a copy hangs in the background of ʼDie
Arnolfinis (Green – The Arnolfinis)ʼ (2011) and a replica of its iconic interior dominates the
right side of ʻBesuch (Visit)ʼ (2012). In the centre of the gallery space is another of Kühnʼs
works - a free-standing, modular construction that seems at once influenced by a
Scandinavian design aesthetic and an altar piece (like those made famous by Rogier van
der Weyden). This work, ʻModulʼ (made in collaboration with the Belgium architect Inessa
Hansch) (2012) includes two painted panels within, functioning as a contemporary rethink of
the outmoded religious relic – reborn as a lifestyle device.
Antje Majewski, a Berlin-based artist, fills the last two spaces and is the only artist of the four
also to have exhibited in the Frankfurter Kuntsvereinʼs previous painting exhibition in 2003.
Here, in 2012, Majewski shows two quite different series. In the first space, slender, propped
canvases stand just taller than human height. Ancient trophies carved from clay or bone drift
in front of lazuli blue backgrounds. On the right wall hangs a Neolithic Venus figure or
proto-human form. The thin, vertical and free-standing canvases push the works into a more
sculptural role, toy with figurative qualities thanks to their scale, and intrigue through their
incongruity. The next space, ʻTans RGBCMYKʼ (2009) is composed of multiple canvases,
sculptural pieces on the floor, and a loose web of colourful extension cords that arc across
the room. In the corner stands a small screening room for a video work, ʻThe Nestʼ (2012),
the floor of the structure filled with coarse sand. In ʻThe Nestʼ we see a lone figure as they
move from their studio, out into the night. In their hand they hold a spotlight, connected to
the studio by a long line of power cords. The spotlight drifts across different scenes shadows fall within bins, light and dark curdle in dank alleyways and the pitch black is
pierced by bright flashes. This is the symbol of the artist as explorer, determined to bring up
new forms that pry away from familiar ground.
ʻPainting of Uncertain Placesʼ sets out to argue for figurative paintingʼs ongoing validity and
capacity to do things abstraction canʼt, such as functioning “as a space for rumination…as
bearers of broader ideas.”[2] However, in actuality the show seems more determined to
present four separate surveys rather than grappling with its own central premise. Ultimately,
the curator seems to justify the worksʼ presumed absence of meaning as creating a vessel
for self-projection, allowing them to be “negotiable or indefinite.”[3] By these terms, each
artist, through their technical proficiency, succeeds at creating beguiling and engaging
worlds.
[1] Frankfurter Kuntsverein ʻDeutschemalereizweitausenddreiʼ http://www.fkv.de/frontend_en
/archiv_ausstellungen_detail.php?id=36 (Accessed 4 September 2012)
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
2 of 2
13.01.14 14:27
Jens Kassner: Eigentlich Romantiker,
Leipziger Volkszeitung (LVZ), 01/2014.
Xamou Art: Tilo Baumgaertel the New Leipzig school artist,
Xamou Art, 08/07/2012
Tilo Baumgaertel the New Leipzig school artist
http://www.xamou-art.co.uk/tilo-baumgartel-the-international-...
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Taken for a ride - but a very fine one indeed
Fernkurs: Kreatives
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www.akademie-fuer…
Tilo Baumgärtel the international artist from Leipzig
Fernlehrgang zum
kreativen Malen und
Zeichnen. Alle Infos
hier!
Characteristically, the painter Tilo Baumgärtel depicts spaces with an
undercurrent of tension and loneliness. The compositions might at first appear
linear narratives as loaded with minimalist fragments but they are everything
but.
There is this eerie Edward Hopper-like quality to his works as one key
ingredient, though Hopper never did it 100% like that. Then another ingredient
is the expressive use of colour rarely seen elsewhere. In Hydroplane you see
duo-tone areas clearly creating associations to printed materials. That is stuff
faded unevenly due to exposure of too much direct sunlight. It is like a printed
poster left a decade or so in a shop window with the magenta and yellow
burned away. It is as if there is no life, and a sense of decay. The boat in this
‘would-be’ East German landscape is realistically painted, but the idyllic scene
is disturbed by the fact that the house is submerged in water.
His paintings can be full of colours, and yet he is a master of combining them in
ways that display a lifeless dullness quite deliberately. He is perhaps a master
of capturing the former east block with- or without being conscious of it.
Google-Anzeigen
Up untill 1989, the whole nation could do with a lick of paint. Count in houses,
garden gates, windows, train carriages; the lot. The uneasy feeling of the party
keeping tab on everything, and things not being everything they appeared to be,
are all factors visible in his art. However, it is worth mentioning that his
expression probably would have been as allowed and encouraged by the
former regime, as it is with the current. Much of the ‘old or original Leipzig
school did their own cutting edge and ambivalent work we now mount in
exhibitions.
enigmatic visual riddles
Anoyther of Bamgärtel’s works ‘Wartezeit’ (waiting time) displays a lonely bus
shelter. The trailing plant is looking like a person waiting, and the very presence
of the plant suggest no one human comes and sits there very often, but it might
also suggest that nature takes over from the concrete.
A third painting features (amongst other things) a step ladder plonked down
outside. But it is somehow leading out of the picture frame, leaving you wonder
what’s hanging above. A pitch black figure is sitting besides, but painted flat
solid colour almost like a silhouette. It is this experience of being sent on a
picnic. On your way to the agreed location, you find out the that edge of the
1 of 2
13.01.14 14:29
Tilo Baumgaertel the New Leipzig school artist
http://www.xamou-art.co.uk/tilo-baumgartel-the-international-...
world is constantly being extended with the aid of holograms, plasterboard and
chewing gum. It is as if you are being told to crawl up a lightbeam knowing full
well that the light might be turned off.
His work are best summed up as enigmatic visual riddles. They are somewhere
between reality, dream or nightmare, and yet you are not allowed to call it
surreal – because however good – the surreal of Dalí and Magritte comes with
a heavy cargo. One which consists of art historical referencing and cross
referencing that is a suffocating blow to contemporary artists by instantly
labelling them as anachronisms.
The track record
The German artist Baumgärtel has been a rising star for some time. He has a
strong work ethics and several good solo exhibitions under his belt. The exhibit
venues chosen have been everything from the predictable European home turf
to further afield such as China, South Korea and the US. His works have
already been collected by Saatchi, Arken and Von der Heydt Museum, and he
has been honoured with the award Sachsen Kunstpreis.
Tilo and the New Leipzig School
Born in 1972 in Leipzig, Tilo Baumgärtel is one of a few representatives of what
is increasingly known as the New Leipzig School of painting in the same
generations as Neo Rauch. As with so many artists before him, the journey
towards art has been less than straightforward. Talent alone is never enough in
art, and you have to make ends meet before you can turn professional. Hence,
Tilo chose first to train as a skilled machine technician. He later enrolled in the
local art academy: Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. There he
studied under the influence of Arno Rink amongst others. Somewhere along his
academy days he turned professional and has been ever since.
Article: Tilo Baumgärtel the international artist from Leipzig
Associate: AD
Published: Tuesday, 7th August 2012
Last edited: 22nd October 2012
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13.01.14 14:29
Katinka Fischer: Erotischer Akt in ungewissen Gegenden;
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 07/27/2012
Erotischer Akt in ungewissen Gegenden
Nach langer Pause stellt der
Flanldurter Kunstverein
wieddr Malerei aus. Vier
Kinstler zeigen Arbeiten.
Von Katinka Fischer
Fiir dje Gegenwart Ma3gebliches scheinr
Gegenwartslunsl nur noch mir dbn als
neu bezeichneten Medien tra$po*ieren
zu k6Imen. Das lie0€ sich aus der Tatsache
folgem, dass seit der let?ten Malerei-Ausstellimg im Frankfurter Kunslvercin neun
Jah€ \r'eigangen sind. Mt seiner aktuell€n
Schau wil Dl€ktor Holger Kube'Veotuia
da8 klessische lblelbild r.od dem lnag€ befreien. zu nah arn I'lark, zu derdrna-
ckid, zu museal zu s€in. Ausgewiiblt hat
er dafiir Arb€iten lnn vier zwischen 1958
und 1979 gebor€nen Kiinstlem, dil den
Eindruck vemitteln, dass es hitdsta Zeit
rer dem Tit€l ,Mal€rei der
Ger-run
Senden" frlllen monunental,e
das gaiz€ St€in€me tlaus. Platz
um (Eurr€s 6fhen und erklrmen zu
nen, wie dezidiert die
auf
Fragen der GegenwErt reieren,
sich dabei im Zeieeist zu verfsngen.
Ilarmes Michdek
etw
malt
Monrm€nt.lw..lc TiIa BarmBAtuLe Gemdld.
an R.mbmndl
R.mbra ll
"Di. Na.hitache. erinnen enfetu atch a,
nen Schlihs€l zu seinen Bild-ldeen mit,
wenn er in Hinterhdfe, Abbruchhiuser
oder hinter funkionslo€e Mauem blickt,
uro sich r€rmummte Gestalten heben
Nackten au0ralten, es also kalt und hei0
Viel weiter zurock veMist unterdee
sdmften. Zllsleich wnken ZenEifugal-
Antje Majewski. Lr Form ihrcr in der
Gegenwan etrtstandenen AbbilduDgeo
begesnen sich - endlid? - eine 40 0m
Jahre alte venus und eh 8Om Jslre jnngercr Phalls- elren rich n,,mfiillen.l. lnstallatione; mt Faft theorie auseinander,
kef& auf geometris.he Elemenre, die in
schaften, in denen geom€tsische
rung auf freie Virtuositat Eifft,
tiit auf Miniatur, Weite auf Enge, Bl
Uit auf Idylle und doch all6 in alle
tungen auseioanderzufl iefi en srheinr.
sir
tiviert
die Olsemnld€ d€l Stiidr
solventen von ganz pers6nliche$ E
nissen und biographischen Details,
denen Betrachter irn Normaffal nichts
fahren. Doch nan muss lediglich
hi.sehen, um Fotzdem zu
dass es in di€sen Bildem lor allem um
b€n, Nicht-Haben und die
der gemdten nusion mdgliche
dl48 dies6 Kh.trt Seht.
S.tF. sd niirr liofcn
S.hflcr Ttlo Baungirt€l rus L€ipzit
zugleich sein muss, \rro Affenw€sen leben
und surreale Dingc passieren, sich €twa
ein Arm in eine Wofsknlle r€rwandelt.
Im Ungewissen bleibt nicht nur d€r Orr.
Man fragt sich auch, wann sid dies€ Szenen eretnen, die einen Zustand entwed€r lor oder nach al€r Zeil abarbilden, jedoch nicht all€r Zei! emhoben scheinen.
Die Rembnndt-Replik in seiner
"Nachtwach€" wei$ Baumgiirtel jedenJalls
als in
der Ges.hichte vennkert.Ds
sen
tseffen mit Form, Farbe und oeb€nsgroBer) Fisur die Urthenen der Mslerci auf
die Urthemen der Menschhei! Liebe und
Erotik. So
isl
schlieBlich die MaleEi
elbst der erctische Akt.
Sehr konhele, wie ntt einen Architekturprogramm am Comput€r entworftne
R?iume l6sen sich in S sanne KnhDs Bildem auf in unvrirklich leuchtende land-
derhoch geordneter Fornation nber die
(mnche whbeln. Die Alten Meister hat
audr die FYeibureerin im Blick, wenn sie
B
Eltks benlhmte Arnofini-Hochzeit in z€iigedlssis.he Aslhenk nbers€tzt
und es sicb wieder einmal zeigt,_dais es
Jan van
Gegpn*€n ohne Ces.hichre nicht gibt
und es gut ist, wDnn mall dies€ G€schichte kermt.
Dl.
lcrr.iune
44,
diue.t
im franktuier &nr.€rein, ru,k
arm 16 S€pcmber und ln
dienrtags, donn€6ta$ und ieitags bn I I bh
19, minwhs rcn I 1 bls 2l ro{ie $mr.$ und
sonniags wn 10 bis 19 Uhr gEoftr€r
bls
Christoph Tannert: Tilo Baumgärtel,
Vitamin P2. New perspecitves in painting, 2011, Phaidon, 48-49.
-.c
tsA-l,,GAt;=_
Tilo Baumgärtel seems to have alignec - s =lE-'es
option society'as Peter Gross calls it. referri,rg to :-e ,',a-'
large sections of society have dispensed with the concept of sal
"ation. Representatives of this exlstence appear slack and voiceless, thrust involuntarily into a particular and often peculiar set of
circumstances - slumped on the ground in a makeshitt campsite
next to an amphitheatre, or sharing a cigarette with an Eskimo
during a thunderstorm, for example. The characters in his paintings thus appear strangely inactive - lethargic perhaps, or simply
without purpose.
Baumgärtel is not a social analyst, but he is a realist when it
comes to his own inner worlds - there is something down-to-earth
and believable about the strange scenarios he concocts. His
worldly yet unworldly approach is reflected in deliberately neutral
yet curiously retrospective attire - his characters regularly appear
in period costume from one era or anothen This, however, is only
a trick to liberate himself from rules and norms. He sometimes
leaves realism behind and gets closer to fantasy when he turns
to exaggeration as a strategy, whether in the form of an oversized
animal or a figure verging on caricature.
Some commentators describe his style as fairy-tale, while others
say it is nostalgic. His aim, however is serious engagement. During
an interview in 2oo8 he declared to me,'l see myself as a hinge
between people asking questions on all levels, and as an agitator
who presents his findings and tries to capture madness, beauty,
questionable things and strange things in pictures in order to create
a certain resonance.' He also likes to incorporate a little irony into
his pictures, perhaps to make his messages less indigestible. For
fun, he brings everyday objects absurdly to life - quite literally in the
drawn animation films that he creates alongside his paintings.
Baumgärtel thinks in filmic and theatrical terms, and his staged
spaces have an extraordinary unity as painterly compositions.
Within his complex pictorial arrangements, his figures are exposed
in their isolation. They are shown in interior and exterior spaces,
frozen mid-step as they realize that they have entered at the
wrong time. They wait on staircases and in hallways, on beaches
and wharfs; they meditate at writing desks or pianos or blow their
psychoplasm pensively at the moon, always with unmoved faces
(some reveal their dreams and yearnings, floating above their
heads in the kind of speech bubbles found in comics).
The pictorial spaces that Baumgärtel creates are like memories
and fantasies torn from their proper homes, offering visions of
incipient decay or a looming downfall - we can't help but feel we are
looking at the visualization of someone's worst-case scenario. This
unsettling world is one of beguiling possibilities - of the dark, of
threatening incidents, or of the menace of something unforeseen
that enshrouds the figures in their post-catastrophic surroundings.
Baumgärtel's paintings have considerable affinity with the great
decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - the
spirit of Max Klinger; Arnold Böcklin and Edvard Munch with a leavening of Giorgio de Chirico. The contemporary relevance of his work
is anchored in his respect for tradition and in a sense of rootedness
within it. He has thrown the window of memory wide open and
made the past contemporary. - Christoph Tannert
Woadwoy,2oog
Oil on canvas
30x40 cm
About the Showtime
(Über die Vorste/
Oil on canvas
210 x 3OO
2.
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Oil on canvas
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210x350 cm
21Ox3OO
cm
Hans Werner Schmidt: Begegnung mit Tilo Baumgärtel,
SpinArt, 04/2011.
1
Begegnung mit Tilo Baumgärtel
Im Dezember 2000 bin ich zum ersten Mal den Bildern von Tilo Baumgärtel begegnet. Es
ist eine von Studenten der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst organisierte Ausstellung
in Steibs Hof gewesen – eine temporäre Kunstpräsenz in einem städtischen
leerstehenden Areal, organisiert nach den Maßgaben einer Produzentengalerie.
Rückschauend mag mir dies als Paradebeispiel Leipziger Kunstpraxis erscheinen.
Im Folgejahr besuchte ich den Künstler in seinem Atelier – und erwarb ein Werk für das
Museum der bildenden Künste. Dies sorgte hausintern aber auch beim Künstler und
dessen Kollegenkreis für eine gewisse Irritation. Wie sollte ein damals 29-jähriger Caspar
David Friedrich, Max Klinger und anderen Großmeistern im Museum begegnen?
Das Bild „Begegnung“ entwickelte einen Sog, mich immer mehr einsehen zu müssen.
Zuerst ist da die Fassade eines mächtigen Hauses, dessen Nutzung sich sicherlich nicht
über private Heimeligkeit bestimmen lässt. Keines der Fenster ist erleuchtet, dagegen
taucht ein Illuminationspektakel, ein Zusammenspiel von Nordlicht und bengalischem
Feuerwerk, die Schneelandschaft in einen psychedelischen Farbenzauber. Die weiße
Pracht hat die Landschaft üppig bedeckt – und kreative Geister haben den
Eingangsbereich des verschatteten Hauses humorvoll mit einem Schneemonster
erweitert, das durch seinen geöffneten Mund zum Eintritt auffordert. Unweit davon ist ein
Fahrzeug in einer Schneewehe stecken geblieben. Was des einen Freud, ist des anderen
Leid. Eine Gestalt bewegt sich davon fort und fixiert dabei eine ihm entgegenkommende
Person. Beide Figuren sind vom gleichen Farbfluss „gezeichnet“ und so prononciert, wie
die sanft sich auftürmenden Schneewehen. Die „Begegnung“, hier in deutlicher Distanz
arrangiert, bleibt offen: Annäherung oder Konfrontation? Verweisen die dunklen Schatten
im Vordergrund auf Zeugen, oder haben alle den Ort angesichts der „Schneekatastrophe“
verlassen? Ein Wort, das einem durch den Schlagzeilen orientierten Journalismus leicht
über die Lippen geht, wobei die Schreckensdimension einer Katastrophe ausgeblendet zu
werden droht. Die hiesigen Winter 2009 und 2010 sorgten – selbst in der Stadt – für einen
katastrophenfreien Stillstand. Die weiße Pracht kaschierte alle urbanen
Unzulänglichkeiten, minimierte den urbanen Geräuschpegel Richtung Ruhezone und
forderte die Passanten in Flaniermeilen auf, sich einen Weg zu bahnen. Seit zehn Jahren
stellt mir das Bild immer wieder neue Fragen und es gibt mir stets neue Antworten.
2
Baumgärtels Figuren haben es meist schwer, voranzukommen. Neben den
Schneewehen sind es oft morastiges Gelände oder schilfumsäumtes Sumpfland, das den
Bewegungsabläufen hinderlich ist. Das Fortkommen ist nur den (wenigen) Akteuren
gegeben, die über das Vermögen verfügen, sich in einen Schwebezustand zu
transferieren. In den geräuscharmen Zonen treffen wir auch auf vielerlei Arten des
Müßiggangs. Bei Baumgärtel begegnen wir Schlafwandlern, Tagträumern und SichLiebenden. Diejenigen, welche aus den Trancegestimmtheiten ausscheren, mögen zwar
über eine dynamische Ausstrahlung verfügen, doch der Zweck ihres Tuns und das Ziel,
auf das sie orientiert sind, bleibt im Nebel, wie soviele Horizonte in Tilo Baumgärtels
Landschaften.
Die Ruhe, welche aus den Bildern wie ein gering dosiertes Narkotikum in den Raum
zwischen Betrachter und Werk dringt, ist oft eine trügerische. Die anscheinend leer
gefegte Straße wirkt wie die Piste für einen gleich um die Ecke biegenden Amokfahrer.
Die sich den Hang hocharbeitende Bergsteigertruppe ahnt noch nichts vom kommenden
Lawinenunheil. Die rustikale Bebauung entlang der Dorfstraße schirmt die Öffentlichkeit
von den privaten familiären Tragödien hinter den Fassaden ab.
Doch wer sind diese Lebewesen, denen Baumgärtel zu ihren Auftritten verhilft? Es sind
Menschen, die sich ansatzweise in einem Mutationsprozess zu Comic-Figuren befinden.
Das heißt über karikierende Elemente sollen Wesenszüge augenscheinlich werden.
Baumgärtel bevorzugt dabei ein Alter, das selten über den Teenager-Status hinausgeht.
Und die treffen dann auf anscheinend zum Leben erweckte Kuscheltiere, denen man auf
Augenhöhe begegnet. Diese Mensch-Tier-Zusammenkünfte finden oft an Orten deutlicher
Verwahrlosung statt, wobei die hier Auftretenden Gleichmut demonstrieren. Aufgegebene
Laubenansiedlungen, dem Stadtorganismus durch Trassenführung verlorengegangene
Bezirke, still gelegte Industrieareale sind die vom Künstler bevorzugten Terrains – Unorte.
Tilo Baumgärtel äußert sich wie folgt über seine Akteure: „In den Comics von Robert
Crumb merkt man irgendwann gar nicht mehr, dass dort kleine Schweine oder Katzen
agieren. Mit so einer Normalität möchte ich damit umgehen. Tiere sind gute Erzähler,
auch in Fabeln beispielsweise.“ (Leipziger Volkszeitung, 13.7.2007, S. 10). Das, was auf
den ersten Blick wie eine Illustration, ein Szenenbild zu einer Fabel aussieht, ist eine von
3
Texten unabhängige visuelle Setzung. Der Bildbetrachter erfährt stattdessen die
Aufforderung, nun als Autor das Bild einzubetten in seine ureigene Geschichte.
In diesem Gedankenspiel sollte er ein nicht ganz einfaches Genre beherrschen. Der
Künstler: „Ich versuche immer Tragikkomik zu erzeugen. Die Bilder wirken zwar oft
unheimlich, aber ich habe den Humor im Blick. Ich amüsiere mich auch über meine
Bilder.“
Vielleicht ist es doch einfacher, den Faden aus Tilo Baumgärtels Bildern fortzuspinnen.
Tragikkomik ist ein gewichtiger Wesenszug unserer Wirklichkeit und müsste uns damit
sehr vertraut sein.
Hans-Werner Schmidt
Tony Godfrey: The Leipzig school,
Painting today, 2009, Phaidon, 370-389.
PHAIDOI{
Painting Today
v,,
It.
413. Norbert Bisky
Muck Spreader
lD re cks ch
I
e u
de
l,
2O06.
Oil on canvas,210 x 420 cm
(823/a
@m
w#,
x 165Y2in)
414. Wolfgan. {\,4attheuer
Behind the Seven Mountains
lHinter den sieben Bergen),
efr
Y\Yü
1
973. Oil on hardboard,
170 x 130 cm (67 x 51% in)
l1
415. Neo Rauch
Auiz,2OO2. Oil on canvas,
250 x
-d
.d-'
The so-called'Leipzig School' has been described
as 'the first art world phenomena of the twenty-first
century' and 'the twenty-first century's first artistic
phenomenon'. lt is 'the hottest thing on earth', we
are
told by Joachim Pissarro, a curator from the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Neo Rauch
'is to the twenty-first century as Max Beckmann is to
the twentieth century'. These are big claims!
Historically, the importance of a movement, if it is
one, is that it creates a paradigm shift, a great leap
Various reasons have been given {or the
continuing pre-eminence of German painting: that
German society takes culture and collecting seriously;
that the art school system works best in Germany,
employing major artists and giving them a free hand to
teach by example; that the trauma of the Third Reich
and division between East and West has provided a
need for art as analyst and healer First, one should add
that we see in Germany a {ascinating paradox: a
generally complacent society that neveftheless supports
versions of traumas seen elsewhere.
Many remain unconvinced, seeing these
artists' work as nothing but a marketing ruse
Germany has four myths about its nature and its
future, each rich and replete with visual images. Firstly,
concocted by a number of clever dealers, a {eeding
frenzy for rich collectors grown desperate to have
the latest thing. 'We're talking fin-de-siöcle ennui in
the flesh
the images represent no intellectual
the Romantic German fixation on nature, often
associated with Caspar David Friedrich; the racist,
-
helplessness, loss of utopias, their paintings tell
of a standstill, of waiting for something vague.' Other
its own critics generously; and second, one could
obserue that the German traumas are just more intense
militaristic dream of the failed painter Adolf Hitler and
the Nazis; the socialist workers' paradise of the East
German state, the DDR; and finally the" capltalist,
Americanized fantasies of rich, industrial West Germany.
Painting had (and has) a crucial part in embodying
these four myths or visions. The reuni{ied Germany of
the twenty-first century has no new equivalent visual
myth, but the four old visions remain syndromes that no
writers decry their melancholy, their loss of purpose,
silence and passivity, how, 'with their set-meal offer
therapy can suppress. For a German, images of nature,
people and society cannot but have associations,
o{ retro-socialist Surrealism all they really display
is a certain kind of painterly skill coated in Teutonic
ambivalence, with the political sting removed
paintings packaged lii<g a de luxe brand, wirh a
often conflicting ones. This was true of Baselitz or Kiefer
and remains true of today! artists.
discreet air of consensus and admiration.' Rauch, we
told, 'invokes the ta-ste of German-ness, but he
{ails to grasp the historical realities of the country
and instead produces images that are as superficial as
are
they are mythical ... a confused sense o{ Germanic
identity lacking any critical sensibility,.
More than photography or film, painting
where these four myths can co-exist, collide or
0 cm (9812 x 823/a in)
Art, Los Angeles
,#
.forwards; it changes the way we think, as
lmpressionism or cubism did. Do the Leipzig artists
Rauch, David Schnell, Matthias Weischer et a/. do this?
threat whatsoever. They Iack youthful audacity, anger,
ambiguity or allegorical sophistication', writes the
critic Christian Schüle. 'Their appeal is a negative one,
their meaninglessness touches a nerve of the present,
21
Museum o{ Contemporary
is
coalesce. Even those artists who, unlike Jonathan
Meese or Daniel Richter, eschew a political position,
cannot but let this happen. The inner contradictions
of this myth-ridden country remain as constant but
profitable irritations to a younger generation, even
though they tend to look asl<ance at the earnestness
a.
a
\p.t.
ä
1'
Painting Today
with which that older generation of Baselitz et a/.
engaged with 'German-ness'. As Norbert Bisky
remarked, he and his contemporaries have their'feet
in the muck, nose in the clouds'. lf we look at Bisky's
phantasmagoric Muck Spreader, we see echoes of
Friedrich, Fascist and socialist heroes (all Aryan blond)
and capitalist advertising. but all now morphed into
something new, simultaneously delirious andwry / +'tz /.
Why Leipzig? There is the perverse romance
of the place, which we would once have seen as the
acme of the unromantic: dreary socialist housing, run-
down factories and rotting military barracks. We see
the conjunction of the new with the old: autobahns
and McDonald's alongside the failed project of the
DDR, There was the continuity of the Hochschule
für Grafik und Buchkunst, where Wolfgang Mattheuer
and Werner Tübke still taught and where students
learned to draw in a traditional manner / 414 /, and
where they would be asked to consider how Cranach
solved figure-ground problems, rather than the
theories of Derrida. 'The disadvantage of the Berlin
wall was well known,' the director of the Hochschule,
Arno Rink, ruefully mentioned, 'but if you want
to talk of an advantage, you can say it allowed us to
continue in the tradition of Cranach and Beckmann.
It protected art against the influence of Joseph
Beuys.' ln fact, many of the artists now associated with
Leipzig came from the former West Germany,
attracted by the chance to concentrate on painting,
its traditional genres and techniques. The skill levels of
these painters are, indisputably, exceptionally high.
Neo Rauch is a little older than this new lauded
(or hyped) generation and indeed helped teach them.
His early success fed their ambitions and perhaps 'gave
them permission'to follow their instincts and keep their
touch light, unlike the older generation, with their paint
clogged, all-so-serious canvases. We have considered
Raucht paintings in terms of carnival, o{ the world
turned on its head, but it is also wholly valid to see his
paintings in terms of politics, especially when we
*e,s
pff
remember that he trained in the 1980s to be a painter
for socialist East Germany but graduated in 1990 in
a united capitalist Germany. His painting Ouiz could be
read as merely comic, but there is something more
sinister about the man being quizzed or interuiewed,
crumpled on his knee, head in hand / ats /. This is
a bad dream: being asked to {it geometric shapes
together while the interviewers mark you, as though
in an ice-skating competition, and one ofthe shapes
cheekily comes to life and stares at you. lt is wholly
feasible to see this as an allegory of the Eastern worker
flung into a Western workplace whose rules he does not
understand and for which he has not been prepared.
The painting, both in content and style, wobbles
between bathos and pathos, between the modernity of
television furniture and the homeliness (Gemüt/ichkert)
of old-fashioned German houses.
Painting Today
People have often seen Rauch's paintings as
420. Thoralf Knobloch
Diver (Springer),20O1. Oil oo
95 x 1 70 cm
canvas,
(37 Y2
x 67 t^)
Ey
e Co nt
a c
t lB I ckko n
i
ta k
t),
2004. Oil and acry ic on canvas,
90
70 cm (35Y2 x 27 lz in)
'
in my art that is based on my command of painting, the
how empty such works were. This seems wrong. lt
professional use o{ colour and technique.' Like
is
perhaps better to see his worl( as carnivalesque: for all
his wit and japes, this is serious, solid art. He tells us
421. Tim Eltei
'
1
90 cm l102Yz x 783/a in)
423. Tim Eltel
Hole (Grube),2008. Oil on
canvas,221
187
*
x 69Y2i^)
176.5 cm
dream and consciousness, between reason and
'ltt
unreason:
ln this he is, perhaps surprisingly, very like Kiefer Rauch
really explain this, I wouldn't have painted it.'
New Drum Roiis (Neue Ro//en) seems to play on
himsel{ wishes to see his work as timeless. Everything is
grist to his mill.
Boygroup,2003. Oil on canvas,
a
psychoanalyst, he rides in the liminal area between
nothing directly about Germany, but in endlessly
recycling its iirages he re{ive: Inuch of its recenL history.
422. Tim Eitel
260
inner conflicts in my work. There's a healing aspect
pastiches of socialist realism or as demonstrations of
I refrain
both from any hierarchization and from
this strange twilight zone between reason
ancl irrationality where tlre ariist lrLrnts lor prey. lf i coi,ld
the French Revolution: we see men lifting red Phrygian
caps (the symbol of liberty in '1789) on their sabres, while
in the background a figure sits on a guillotine / 416 /.
ä conscrous evaluation of my pictorial inventory. This
'For me the {unction of paintings
means that elements /ike Balthus, Vermeer, Tintin,
..
Donald Judd, Donald Duck, agit-prop and cheap
the actors on the stage.' lf he gets them on the stage,
advertising garbage can flow together in a furrow of my
he leaves them mid-scene, with the farce
childhood landscape and generate an intermingled
conglomerate of surprising plausibility.
-
is
to work with myths
.having set the fundamentals, the stage, I introduce
-
or tragedy
unfinished. Things are always happening in
Rauch's work, people are always making or searching
but rarely completing or finding. ln one of his more diaThe metaphor he uses to describe himself as a painter
grammatic, earlier paintings, Seeker, as a man searches
'l view myself as a kind of peristaltic
filtration system in the river of time. I view the process
of painting as an extraordinary natural form of
for land-mines with a magnetic ring, Annunciation-like
discovering the world, almost as natural as breathing',
whether this beam is a quotation {rom a quattrocento
Rauch says. Natural and therapeutic: 'l try to evoke
painting or, like Roy Lichtenstein, frcm a carloon
is an unusual one:
:
,;;.
'llq';.':*i-.;.:-.-.:-.
---:.
."
.
a beam of light strikes the canvas waiting on an easel.
It is typical of Rauchl ambivalence that we are not sure
/
4'19
/.
The Leipzig School
426. Eberhard Havekost
Global Player,2OO4.
Oil on canvas,280 x 145 cm
(1O9
x 56 lz tn)
Of the group of painters that have become
brought up in the East, and it
to waiting.
is he who is closest to
more readable: their spaces are more like those in this
427. lvlatthias Weischer
Overhe ad Light
lobetlicht),
2006. Oil and egg tempera
on canvas, 1 20 x 1 50 cm
@7%
x 59 in)
on'in a sitting-room.
As so many of the dramatis personae in paintings by
Rauch in creating such stage sets. But his stories are
following pages:
a television permanently left
famous in Rauch! wal<e perhaps only Tilo Baumgärtel is
truly similar. He is one of the few Leipzig 'stars' actually
world, or those in films. lt seems often as though
Leipzig ariists, the figures in Eitel! work are consigned
Some of this mood of anomie I as to do with
the way Eitel uses photographs as sketches, perfecting
and abstracting them in the paintings. Stoic
l'tz /.
to direct storytelling like
Rauch!, this painting suggests being on the point of
philosophers lamented that we were but strangers in a
world we had not made, and this is what Francis Bacon
demonstrating some allegory
shows us as strangers in the world that we have made.
Hunting Lodge by the
As David Schnell was finishing his painting
Sea (Hütte am See) he painted out
the legs of the tower from which hunters shoot game
superimposed: the boys leave no footmarl<s in the sand
as they wander off to the dunes / t22 /. Their wandering
/ +rs /. Likewise he did not paint in the leaves of the
which he had calculated the painting's geometry. The
is laddish, aimless, unlike the questing poets and
pilgrims in Friedrich! paintings. 'l have no relationshlp
to the countryside whatsoever', Eitel says. 'For me, the
woods at the back,
assumed euphoria, the elegiac, is rather an expression
characters are waiting for something to happen /
Although Baumgartel
is closer
bulrushes and left in all those compositional lines by
lil<e
the forests he often paints,
often painted
-
man alienated in nature
-
but Eitel
Even when they are seen in nature, his figures seem
seem schematic, very different from the archetypal
o{ {ailure. Since the romantic experience of nature
Romantic German woods as painted by Caspar David
does no longer work for me, God is not in every plant.'
Friedrich. Schnell's paintings, for example his
Flyover (Auffahrt)
/ see
zg6
For Eitel, light is ambient, even and artificial
/, seem to depict a model
o{ the world rather than reality. ln the train stations of
continental Europe one can often find a glass vitrine in
which a beautifully made model landscape, often
replete with historical buildings and wooded hills,
is
criss-crossed by trainlines. lnserting a 1 Euro coin will
send the model trains moving round this landscape.
Made with impressive detail by the Mäcklin Company,
they present an innocent, immaculate world. Much of
the appeal of the Leipzig painters
to offer a 'Mäcklin'world.
is the way they seem
even nature seems illuminated by tungsten lighting.
-
Perhaps because this undramatic light is a constant
condition in other paintings, his characters, like the
undead in horror films, seem to cast no shadow;
generally they are as unanimated as the plastic figures
that wait at the platform for the Mäcklin train. Yet there
is also an air of calm and beauty in his work, often,
recently, accentuated by paintings that evoke the hour
of twilight / 423 /. Perhaps his appeal is like ihat of the
nineteenth-century fläneur, the man disengaged,
window shopping and happy in his disengagement
Partly this is because they often paint scenes
in a world of spectacle. He makes manifest the strange
as though they are an unfinished construction site,
pleasure we can find in the anonymity and ubiquity
partly it is because they are such conscious technicians
of non-places, those museums, offices, municipal parks
and partly it is because their work hovers between
and airport waiting-rooms that lack defining
figuration and abstraction. Schnell's canvases are
characteristics.
formally sophisticated, as satisfying as the best abstract
It is a rare shock when, in his painting
painting. His newest paintings demonstrate this
Eye Contact, one
concern with complex but coherent composition: there
is greater improvisation, more unexpected colour
museum turns and catches our eye /
relationships, but above all there
which museum it
made painting
/
424
is
the sense of a well-
/.Thedeeperappeal
is in seeing
ofthe women floating through the
lzl /. Her
expression tells us nothing. We cannot tell, as always,
is
-
it could just as well be
a
computer simulation. The eye and the way it catches
someone make a new world, not so much unreal as
our own remind us that Eitel! world is perhaps
parallel to our own. ln this world things are precise and
balanced, despite also being strange: objects fly or
parallel one and one that is inhabited.
hover, it is very silent.
Kobe seems to explore postmodern or cybernetic
Like Schnelll work, the paintings of Tim Eitel
a
Like Julie Mehretu or Matthew Ritchie, Martin
space, but in fact he never uses acomputer / +25 /.
can be seen as nice but anonymous, elegant but une-
He is fascinated by modern architecture, by what
motional. Again this is slightly inaccurate.,People in
Eitel's paintings wander through the museum and pose
he terms 'the frozen beauty of urban situations. The
elegantly in their everyday clothes. The geornetry of
complex structures that he invents lceep breal<ing apart:
the museum's architecture is represented meticulously,
paint flows and drips:
echoing Mondrian's grids
-
labyrinthine quality of rooms. The coldness.'These
or those of some immacu-
lately kept prison. Above all, they do not connect.
While I paint the /ogistics of the room slip out of my
Eitel rarely paints people looking at paintings: where
control; the free play of painting is the precondition for
paintings are shown, they are in the background, like
things to gain in openness. ... While I paint I move like
Painting Today
a blind man through the structures I erect. ...
tension that we get in the interior paintings of Vermeer,
I repeatedly over-paint, destroy and question the
that tease of eyes gazing or averted. lt is not so
architecture that / sketch out. ... Painting and
much that there is no-one in his interiors as that there
architecture aim at something completely different,
are no eyes inside the spaces animating them. These
while I understand my form of work as 'core meltdown'.
seem more like meticulous autopsies. Weischert early
Freed,;m and play in opposition to structLrre are
paintings often had a container, a caravan or suit
of clothes that could stand as an equivalent of a figure.
constant theme in Leipzig painting
-
a
and elsewhere.
ln more recent paintings, where people do emerge,
One could see this as synonymous with the struggle
they lack faces
of the individual in society, or of an emotional being in
awaiting the presence of life. Sometimes a mere
a world
dominated by cybernetics and geometry.
The painters of Leipzig! rival town Dresden are
presented as both cool analysts o{ pictorial problems
and faithful recorders ofthe everyday as opposed to
'languishing in kitschy world-weariness painted in the
manner of the Old Masters, like the Leipzig school'.
Artists such as Thoralf Knobloch and Eberhard Havekost
work from photographs. Knobloch's Diver / +zo
/
intriguing riposte to Hockney's A Bigger
/ see
Spiash
is an
ro /: Hockney shows us a glamorous and eternally sunny
-
they are husks of people or shells
fragment will appear: a leg, as in a crime scene, or
both legs. Objects are key: if we seem strangers in this
world that we have not made, it is nonetheless
strangely familiar to us now because we have filled it
with the things we have made. These may appear to
be highly technical academic paintings, but to a greater
degree these are paintings about how we attempt to
make and inhabit our world.ln Overhead Light
(Ober/icht) a man is seen in a top-lit art gallery, waiting,
Knoblocht image, with its belly-flopping boy, lacks the
bathing in the light, incompletely formed / +zt /. As
always, tiny smears and snicks of paint forbid one ever to
believe this is an illusion of reality. The lumpiness of the
air of elegant sexiness that Hockneyt poolside
paint at the edge emphasizes this.
California, Knobloch a time-stained municipal pool.
paintings have. But both play on the unreality of
Like Schnell, Weischer uses the word 'play'
painting: Hockney with his unpainted margin, Knobloch
(in German, 'splei'):
with his PollockesQue dribbles of green and white.
Havekost sometimes refers to his pictures as
At first I think abstractly in terms of the composition,
'user interfaces': the on-screen appearance of a
computert operating system. Between 'reality' and the
canvas is the camera and the computer. He laments that
form and colour, and then I play around. lf I think then
about how to continue, rather figurative images appear
.he can no longer take holiday snaps: everywhere has
been taken over by the media, so that our experience
frequently, and set something new on the canvas.
in my mind. Now I usually over-paint the picture
of reality and of the imagery that mediates it seem to
It is easy to criticize Weischerl work as cold
have become synonymous. Havekost's work can be
seen as a meditation on this state of affairs: living with
and artificial, but his is a unique vision, and the skill and
deliberateness with which he uses those smears and
apparent loss of reality. The creative work or play for
him is, first, in the preparation stage, when he adjusts
as much attention and weight as the figurative elements.
or distorts his starting image in Photoshop, and second,
as he adjusts the painting, working 'like a plastic
surgeon'. Although he sets the canvases up as places
where we may find associations and sensation, they
seem placeless: the faces have become generic
or, as here, hidden
-
or protected
/
lzo /.lmpeccably
painted, elegant, cold, the paintings seem to be of
a world slipping into that abstracted land, Generica.
But Havekost's intention is the opposite: 'Today .
snicks are unparalleled. Such abstract marks are given
It may also turn out that Weischer is the
greatest colourist in German painting since Emil Nolde.
When we look at his Memling, we may be first struck
by the screen with the appended image by the
Flemish parnter Hans Memling and the way Weischer's
composition echoes Hockney! portrait of Henry
Geldzahler
/
see og; a2e / . (As part of a scholarship
Weischer went to work with Hockney.) We may also
notice the other elements
the skeletal hat-stands,
-
painting is a way to get closer to reality. To the reality
that is detached from appearances, the counter-world,
the world of thought.' To a far greater extent than
earlier photorealism, his and Knoblocht work form
which are strangely like Schnellt trees, and the
a critique of the way we use representation.
in counterpoint.
work
is
One thing that is odd about Maühias Weischer's
that he paints interiors like still lifes. When we
look at still lifes by seveiieenth-century Dutch or
Spanish artists, we see a stasis of composit;on and
tremendous attention to detail. What we do not get in
Weischert work is anything like the play of erotic
ubiquitous drips and smears
-
but what dominates the
painting and is in fact its heart or voice,
is
the vast
expanse of blue, to which all the reds and yellows are
As so often, this is a painting of the studio:
on the one hand, we may say Weischer treats it like a
computer screen on which things can appear and be
dismissed or morphed, and yet it is also, above all,
a homage to other great studio paintings by Vermeer
or Veläzquez or Picasso. As with them, so here
Painting Today
a
a
t o
I t
l
I
the studio is a philosophical space where we can
both embody the world and meditate on it.
Furthermore one must emphasize how very physical
these paintings are, how specifically they are made
with paint: in places smooth, in places Iumpy,
scratched and caressed. This
of a virtual reality.
is
the very opposite
Of the six graduates of the Leipzig academy
who are normally cited as the key Leipzig artists
(the others being Baumgärtel, Eitel, Kobe, Schnell
and Weischer), Christoph Ruckhäberle is the one
most fixated on human figures. When we consider
that socialist realism was above all a painting
of human figures enga'ged in making history, it
is
telling that Ruckhäberle shows figures almost
wholly in private seclusiän. Often they are shown in
rooms in groups doing nothing but waiting. ln
Farewell (Abschied) we see an encounter group stuck
in a banal flat / +zc /.
The role of women in Leipzig painting has been
questioned. People have asked why there are so few
women painters in the Leipzig school, änd whether this
is a boys' club, as German painting of
the 1 980s was.
'First,' Baumgärtel has remarked, 'men seek sublimation
in painting: women are too intelligent for that. And,
second, there are women.' He refers, among others, to
Rosa Loy, whose paintings, as if to make a point, have
a greater irony than those of other Leipzigers. Like
them, she takes surrealism, as seen in a painting such as
Hiding Place, but her emphasis on creating a personal
mythology
is far
greater: her work is less technical /
+go
Many people abhor contemporary painting
for its lack of technical skill. Artists come out of art
school lamenting they have not been taught such
skills
as many once complained that that was
-.1ust
all they were taught. The commercial success of
Leipzig painting, much like recent Chinese painting,
is due
to its technical excellence: it looks difficult to
/.
do. When David Schnell says that for him going to
Leipzig was like being 'thrown back into the
nineteenth century', many would think 'Oh great, real
skills at last!'although others would iaugh at such
antediluvianism. (The display of technical skill, as for
example in Japanese nihonga, is often seen as
equivalent to kitsch.) ln Leipzig painting such skill has
been turned to the service of both burlesque and a
critical approach to representation. lt is too little
noted that the school they went to was Hochschule
für Gra{ik und Buchkunst, or the Academy for
Graphics and Book Arts. ln the year 2000 nearly three
times the number of students applied to do
photography there as painting. What distinguishes
the painting department is its antagonistic
relationship with the photography department, not its
privileged isolation. And what distinguishes the
painters that come out of it is thejr need to negotiate
with photography as a medium.
The Leipzig School
t'',.
F:.;
st.'r':r l
'-,1-,-'.tir l:.t:.,
P.iJr;i"-'r.
i:r"1
u#f"**
i- : ;
ls what we have examined here a movement,
a school or a moment? A school implies a shared ideoloEy or working approach that allows lesser artists to
produce high-quality works and gives a ready, comprehending audience for the best artists, It is a microcosm
where competition and collaboration are mutually
help{ul. Certainly there are shared interests: burlesque,
waiting figures and perhaps, above all else, a concern
with space. lt is a postmodern understanding that
psychoanalytic events happen in space and that space
is psychoanalytically charged. The spaces in Kobe and
Schnell are as tense as those in Loy or Rauch, despite
the absence of figures. Stylistically of course,
there is a 'Leipzig look': one of the painters diseussed
above pointed at some unusually neat, schematic
passage in one of his works and laughed: 'Look, I do
East German art. A longing for the former East
Germany is common: the cars were dreadful and the
foodstuffs dreary, but it was a secure, comfortable life.
429. Christoph Ruckhäberle
Farewell (Abschiedl , 2aO4
Oil on canvas, 1 90
There was always a job and a place to live, however
(743/a
unglamorous. However, where socialist realism
was optimistic, these painters present the world not
necessarily as pointless but certainly as puzzling:
430. Rosa Loy
alternately delirious and wry. lf we think of Rauch as
restaging Samuel Beckett's plays as comical soap
operas and Weischer as restaging lonesco! Theatre of
the Absurd via The World of lnteriors, we may start to
understand the paradoxes. Ultimately, itis the situation
not the school that matters most: Bisky, for example,
was burtr in Leipzig Eut studied under Baselitz. lf 1989
Leipzig school.'
and the collapse of communism was the key event of
the last fifty years, then art has been surprisingly quiet
about it. lt is to the credit of these artists of the (as we
The work of the Leipzig school has been
termed 'repo-realism': a conscious aping of the style of
address such cultural sea change, however indirectly.
now understand) partly reunified Germany that they do
389
'
.
280 cm
x 11O% inl
Hiding Place l/erstecQ, 24O3.
Casein on canvas, '1 00 x 1 70 cm
l39lz x 67 in).
Essl Collection,
Benjamin Ferguson: Interview with Tilo Baumgärtel,
www.artslant.com, 09/2009.
Interview with Tilo Baumgärtel
by Benjamin Ferguson
London / Sept 2009 - Tilo Baumgärtel presents a series of paintings, conceived and produced over the last two years,
which hang as emblems of why this medium shall live on forever. Displaying them for the first time in Wilkinson gallery’s
newly renovated space (on view from 3 September - 4 October 2009), Baumgärtel utilizes the width of each wall to
magnify his thoughts. His work narrates a series of independent unrealities that describe both his impeccable use of
imagery as a language as well as his imagination. Yet, behind the curtain of each scene is a bedrock of stories, a veil
that only questions could pull back.
BFerguson - Your paintings are wonderful descriptions of your imagination. Are there parts of your mind that you visit
for inspiration or is your work more automatic than that?
Tilo Baumgärtel - The start is mostly a sketch in my drawing book. I seek inspiration from a dream, a text, a movie, the
theatre or just from a thing during the normal course of life. Then I build the painting step by step with a basic composition and the adequate atmosphere.
BF- Preliminary drawings and initial sketches are presented in a book that accompanies the exhibition. Do you think
it’s important to show the route taken to reach the finished piece?
TB- I like to show the intermediate steps like sketches and idea drawings. There are no secrets and I wish to see it
(preliminary work) from other artists as well.
BF- Comparing work from your first solo exhibition in 1998 to the display today, are there less fears for you to draw
inspiration from as you get older or do you think life always presents new things to be scared of?
TB- Yes. I constantly try to become more open and more direct in my work. It’s just the attempt to find the best way
to move from my subconscious to my conscious imagination. I find permanent reasons to be scared and then work
hard to break free of these fears more and more.
BF- You studied animation for a while because you felt that your painting might have reached a dead end. What did
you feel was lacking from your work at that time? Are you satisfied now?
TB- That’s difficult to explain. Sometimes in the past I wanted too much from my own paintings, or just the wrong
things. I noticed that painting often needs more energy, sometimes more commitment and more patience. It’s an
all-or-nothing game and I have to invest a lot of time when I want to use it like a language.
BF- The Leipzig School became renowned for traditional methods of painting and printmaking, a resistance to the
expressionist hab its of the West. Do you think Germany’s East/West divide is relevant to your work today?
TB- I am, of course, aware of the fact that we have an entirely different upbringing and education system in the
east. Although the education was not really imprecise, many aspects, such as intellectualism, pop-culture and the
contemporary west-art at that time were left out. At the core was often a type of search for meaning in terms of
socialism. Not uncommonly, somehow rigid but also touching in a way, somebody said that while artists in the west
in terms of pop-culture flew through the front-shield a long time ago, in the east many are still trying to interpret the
dying Icarus.
BF- Dionysus is referenced in one painting. What is this a call for?
TB- Dionysus stands for chaos, intoxication, anarchy, the unconsciously uncontrolled, and so on. In his text, The Birth of
Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche used the conceptual duality apollinic-dionysic. Thereby, apollinic stands,
for example, for the text of an opera and dionysic for the music, the melody. One can use the conceptual duality
for a variety of things. Thereby Apollo always represents the control, the structure, the culture and its rules. At least in
terms of contemporary a rt I personally wish often for more Dionysus.
BF- But maybe you need to acquire a certain amount of authority before you can indulge completely in your area of
study...Does it bother you to know that drawing is a skill that’s being overlooked in art school syllabuses nowadays?
TB- I know as a fact that in many art universities in Germany the technical basics of traditional fine arts are taught
neglectfully and are not compulsory. That is a shame, because in particular the drawing of these ancient principles
is, due to the directness from the thought to the piece of paper, so poetic and so true, more than almost any other
medium. Hence, there should be an appreciation in the foundations of this study.
Ferguson, Benjamin. Interview with Tilo Baumgärtel, www.artslant.com, September 2009.
Arthur Lubow: The New Leipzig School,
The New York Times, 01/08/2006.
Lubow, Arthur: „ The New Leipzig School“, New York Times, January 8, 2006
The New Leipzig School
When the painters who are now the young lions of the international art scene enrolled at the venerable Art Academy
in Leipzig in the early 1990's, they wanted to study art as it was taught for centuries - drawing from nude models,
mastering the rules of perspective and analyzing formal composition. The ascendance of abstract painting in the
years after World War II had eroded that tradition in the West, elevating originality and authentic feeling over
technique and lifelike depictions, and reducing the word "academic" to a slur. But the Iron Curtain and the Berlin
Wall were effective windscreens, blocking artistic change from ruffling the German Democratic Republic. Figurative
art that was deprecated as hopelessly passé in Paris and Düsseldorf never lost its grip in Leipzig. The city prided
itself on being the birthplace of Max Beckmann and (if you looked back a few centuries and across Saxony to
Wittenberg) on a painterly lineage begat by Lucas Cranach. "The disadvantages of the wall are well known," says
Arno Rink, a 65-year-old recently retired professor of painting who served as director of the academy in Leipzig both
before and after the wall came down. "If you want to talk of an advantage, you can say it allowed us to continue in
the tradition of Cranach and Beckmann. It protected the art against the influence of Joseph Beuys."
Fifteen years ago, the East German Communist regime had only recently collapsed. For students arriving in Leipzig
from the West, coal smoke in the winter sky and gaping windows in derelict buildings exuded a dank romantic
allure. The atmosphere for those who had grown up in the East was even more intoxicating. Their world was in free
fall, mutating rapidly and unpredictably. Even at the academy, which proudly claims a heritage more than two
centuries old, change sizzled in the air. A department of new media was established so that students could make
videos, design conceptual art and construct installations in the manner of the long-shunned Beuys. Meanwhile, in the
unchanged department of painting, the rear guard clung to its palettes. "We learned how to construct a house in
double perspective, or a staircase that spirals up," says Tilo Baumgärtel, an artist who was born in Leipzig. The
painting students, many of them Westerners who had baffled their friends by journeying to the impoverished East for
a traditional education, now had to withstand the ridicule of their peers. "Painting was the most boring department in
the school, and everyone was making jokes about the painters, because they were so old-fashioned in the East
German style," recalls Ricarda Roggan, a Dresden-born photographer.
The first hint of a shift appeared in 1997, when Neo Rauch won the art prize of the local newspaper, the Leipziger
Volkszeitung. Rauch, now 45, came of age in the G.D.R., but he was young enough to absorb the imagery of comic
books, television and computer graphics that shaped the stylistic tastes of his generation. He was a bridge between
the older political painters of the G.D.R. and the young artists of a unified Germany. He wrote his master's thesis at
the Leipzig academy on West German abstract painters of the 1950's, discussing works - "abstract painting, which is
primarily color," he says - that he was unable to see except in "shabby black-and-white reproductions." Having risen,
through industry and talent, to become an assistant to Professor Rink, Rauch painted large canvases in a style that
hovered somewhere between Socialist Realism and Pop Art, of workers in 1950's-vintage uniforms performing
enigmatic tasks of physical labor. The Leipziger Volkszeitung prize and the accompanying show of his work at the
Museum der Bildenden Künste, which is the main Leipzig art museum, presaged an escalating demand for Rauch's
paintings and a one-man show at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York in 2000. The painter with the strange
moniker - his given name was an invention of his parents, and his family name means "smoke" - was gaining an
international reputation that resounded in the academy. "Even in the halls of the school, it is a little smoky," the
students joked. The success of Rauch seemed like a one-off, however. "During our studies we had the feeling that
Neo was a very solitary phenomenon that couldn't be repeated," says Tim Eitel, a painter who moved East from
Stuttgart in 1994.
How wrong they were. Aided by the canny promotion work of Rauch's locally born dealer, Gerd Harry Lybke, this
city of 500,000 in the distant east of Germany has acquired some of the art-world cachet of New York in the 50's or
London in the 90's. Under the rubric of the "New Leipzig School," Eitel, Baumgärtel and several of their classmates among them, Matthias Weischer, David Schnell, Christoph Ruckhäberle and Martin Kobe - have coalesced into a
group phenomenon that, in the words of Joachim Pissarro, curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of
Modern Art, is "suddenly the hottest thing on earth." Although the work of these painters, most of them in their early
30's, varies in content, style and quality, they share a technical skill, a devotion to figurative art and a predilection for
dry-eyed, melancholy subject matter. From the academy in Leipzig, they derive their proficiency. Beyond that, the
mood of Leipzig has provided them with their material. Like other cities in the former G.D.R., Leipzig is plagued
with high unemployment and depopulation. Factories and housing projects stand closed or half-empty, many of them
slated for demolition, while ornate Wilhelmine buildings from the early 20th century undergo restoration. "For me it
is very important that on the one hand, you have these things coming down, but 100 meters away, they are building a
new autobahn," says David Schnell, who hails from Cologne. The Leipzig central train station is a marvel of
reconstruction, with glistening platforms and bustling shops. Board a tram to the southern suburb of Markkleeberg,
where Rauch lives, and in half an hour's time you are confronted with a strip-mined, pock-marked landscape that
evokes, in the words of Hans-Werner Schmidt, director of the Museum der Bildenden Künste, "the scenery of Mars."
In the center of Leipzig, a major thoroughfare named for Karl Liebknecht - the Leipzig-born Marxist revolutionist
who was executed in 1919 - throbs with sleek, packed restaurants serving caipirinhas and arugula salads. The taxi
driver who brings you there is likely to have worked as an engineer or architect in the G.D.R.
Leipzig is experiencing a morning-after moment. The euphoria that greeted German reunification has subsided into
sulky disillusionment. A sour scent of curdled dreams seeps through the empty furnished rooms in Weischer's
paintings and hangs over the half-dressed, enervated young people in Ruckhäberle's. The rotten barns of Schnell's
landscapes, the soulless architecture of Kobe's fanciful futurism, the film-noir chill of Baumgärtel's charcoal
cityscapes, the loneliness of Eitel's young people gazing at flattened vistas - all of these paintings emanate a
disenchantment that is endemic to Germany, especially the former G.D.R., but speaks powerfully to viewers
elsewhere, including the United States. "These are artists who are going back to a literal, descriptive figuration and
giving it an air of anomie," says Robert Storr, a professor of modern art at New York University's Institute of Fine
Arts. "It is happening everywhere. Mostly it is happening in photography, so it is interesting to see it in painting."
Technically accomplished painting with narrative content and a contemporary slant is very easy to sell. One reliable
bellwether is the London collector Charles Saatchi, who has turned from such British installation artists as Damien
Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman, whom he championed in the 90's, to a wide selection of contemporary painters,
including (along with the Leipzigers Weischer, Ruckhäberle and Baumgärtel) the figurative artists Marlene Dumas (a
South African who lives in Amsterdam), Luc Tuymans (Antwerp) and Kai Althoff (Cologne). Even in today's
superheated art market for painting, the Leipzig artists stand out. Collectors jockey to be wait-listed for their new
works, while in the secondary market, their prices rise vertiginously. In 2004, a new painting by Weischer would set
you back about $20,000. At a Christie's auction late last year, a Weischer fetched $370,000, while an Eitel brought
$212,000. The Web site for a traveling exhibition now at Mass MoCA, "Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings
From the Rubell Family Collection," heralds the Leipzig artists as "the 21st century's first bona fide artistic
phenomenon."
Certainly, it is a collecting phenomenon. The two major museum shows of Leipzig painting in the United States have
been exhibitions of personal collections: that of the Miami private museum owners Donald and Mera Rubell, now at
Mass MoCA, in North Adams, Mass., and another one, held at the Cleveland Museum of Art, of paintings owned by
Michael Ovitz. "What happened to us in Leipzig was very unique," says Mera Rubell, who, with her husband, bought
multiple works by five young painters at first viewing, shortly before a group show in the Leipzig museum in fall
2003. "Discovering five artists in one day had never happened to us in 40 years of collecting." The opening of
several new galleries in a former cotton-mill complex in Leipzig last April drew international collectors arriving in
private jets. "Many American collectors grab into this pool of Leipzig very blindly," Rauch observes. "They buy it
from the trademark. 'Is he young? Does he come from Leipzig? Then I buy it."' Not so long ago, Leipzig painters
were isolated inside a bubble that shut them off from the West. Now they are being borne aloft by the bubble of the
speculative art market.
rtists were taken very seriously in the G.D.R., whether they were popular or unpopular," says Sighard Gille, one of
three professors of painting at the Leipzig academy. "After the fall of the wall, painters had to struggle to be taken
seriously." Under a regime that tightly controlled public information, figurative painting could be a propaganda tool
for the state or a transmitter of dissent; either way, it was a potent force. A city historically known for its trade fairs
and book publishing (as well as for its onetime cantor J.S. Bach), Leipzig in the G.D.R. maintained a substantial
degree of political awareness and openness when compared with the tightly monitored capital of East Berlin and the
nostalgic, erstwhile princely capital of Dresden. "Leipzig is still the most open-minded city for contemporary issues,"
says Barbara Steiner, the young director of the Gallery for Contemporary Art in Leipzig. "Dresden is the opposite,
with a very obsessive way of dealing with the past." Dresden's insularity was compounded by geographical
deprivation. Located in a low-lying valley, it could not receive the Western television broadcasts that other residents
of East Germany secretly savored. "Dresden was called 'the valley of people who don't know anything,"' Steiner
says.
The Leipzig academy for painting and architecture opened in 1764, but its emphasis, in keeping with the city's
businesslike attitude, had become more practical by the end of the 19th century. Since 1950, in acknowledgment of
that down-to-earth focus, it has been known as the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst - a center for graphic arts,
like etching, lithography, woodcuts and book design. The academy's importance as a center for painting is relatively
recent. In the 60's, a group of Leipzig painters rose to prominence: foremost among them, Bernhard Heisig,
Wolfgang Mattheuer and Werner Tübke. Despite their very different styles - Tübke was an exquisite draftsman who
emulated the Italian Renaissance and Mannerist artists, Mattheuer's folk-art realism lent itself to parables and
Heisig's angry Expressionist paintings recalled Emil Nolde or the late work of Oskar Kokoschka - all of these artists
exalted the painterly tradition, and their collective success established a nationally esteemed "Leipzig School." The
painting teachers at the academy preferred to concentrate on technical concerns, perhaps because political subject
matter under the G.D.R. was often either disingenuous or dangerous. That instrumental approach continues. "The
difference between Leipzig and the other schools in Germany is that here there is more discussion about how to build
the painting and less about what and why," says Christoph Ruckhäberle, a native of Bavaria. Or, as Matthias
Weischer, who grew up near the Western city of Münster, puts it, "It wasn't so important what to draw, it was just
important to draw and paint - just to keep on working without having any concrete subject or big vision."
Paradoxically, while the artists of the old Leipzig School didn't discuss subject matter when they taught, they
ruminated over it endlessly when they painted. They resorted to symbols to express a veiled criticism of their society
without sacrificing their privileged status. "That was a possibility, using multiple layers, because the functionaries
weren't the brightest people," Arno Rink says. "Icarus plays an important role in Leipzig painting. He is able to fly you can see it as a motif of fleeing - and he gets too close to the sun and falls down, like people who got close to
power. Heisig, Rink, Tübke - everyone used Icarus, because it looked good as a figure and it also had another
meaning." Mattheuer liked the biblical tale of Cain and Abel and the mythological character Sisyphus, who was fated
to push a boulder up a mountain only to see it roll down before reaching the top. Tübke favored Christian references,
like the Pietà. "These were used in a very intelligent way and could be read by people who were intelligent and had a
higher level of education," Rink says. "Nobody paints a Sisyphus or Icarus anymore. Artists are free to interpret the
world without enigmatic tools." Rink was a lifelong party member, but people on all sides of the political debates
miss the days when both politics and painting seemed important. "Back then, there were problems we had to cope
with," Rink says. "I think society today is quite superficial in many ways. It is only normal that painters include this
superficiality in their work."
The old Leipzig School disintegrated in the late 70's, when the G.D.R. began to display these painters' critical works
as proof that dissent and freedom of thought existed in their society. "That was not our intention," Gille says. "We
thought the state should be criticized. We didn't voice our criticism to support the state. We painted in a figurative
way, and the following generation didn't want to do that. They thought it would be a concession to the state. Many
started to do abstract paintings." But it was hard to win at this game. Taking advantage of the popularity of
abstraction in the international market, the government turned around and sold the nonfigurative paintings in the
West to gain hard currency. By the time the wall fell, the Leipzig artists hardly knew where to look or how to paint.
As a young man, Neo Rauch tried on the styles of Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Markus Lüpertz and Bernhard
Heisig. Eventually he settled into a style of his own. A mature Rauch painting contains figures with the mythological
aura of a Sisyphus or Icarus. The iconography, however, is personal, and regardless of how well educated or
intelligent the viewer, the code cannot be broken. The paintings convey a mood, not a message.
Rauch's own history is the stuff of legend. Start with the name, which, he complains, "was a torture for me in my first
20 years." Every time he said it, he had to explain it. "The most terrible thing about it is most people think it is a
pseudonym that I created to make myself more interesting," he says. "And this name seems like innovating, and I
consider myself to be a very conservative person." Worst of all, he has no idea why his mother and father gave him
the name, because he never had the chance to ask them.
When Neo was 6 weeks old, his parents were killed in a train crash just outside the Leipzig station. His father was a
21-year-old art student at the academy in Leipzig, and his mother, after completing a required stint of farm work,
was planning to enroll there. Following the accident, his maternal grandparents raised him in a small town,
Aschersleben, in the foothills of the Harz Mountains. He was surrounded on the walls of their apartment by his
father's dark charcoal portraits and mining scenes. "There was a prophecy that he would die early, and this seems to
be in his drawings," Rauch says. "When he was 5 or 6, he was walking hand in hand with my grandmother through a
supermarket, and suddenly an old woman comes up and says to her, 'Be careful with this boy, he will not live to be
older than 30."' Taking up drawing and watercolor painting, Neo resolved when he was 15 or 16 that he, too, would
study art in Leipzig.
Rauch's ramrod-straight posture and the unwavering gaze of his pale blue, almond-shaped eyes give him the
appearance of a Prussian soldier. "He is an art soldier," Sighard Gille says. "He has a secret love of the military. You
can see it in the painting." Rauch's self-discipline is renowned. He works every weekday from 9 in the morning until
6 at night, with a midday break to prepare lunch for his wife, the painter Rosa Loy, and their 15-year-old son. Taking
after Rauch, the young Leipzig painters all pride themselves on their orderly work habits, which they contrast with
the dissolute lives led by students in West German art academies. "Being an artist is much more important in
Düsseldorf than the art itself," Tim Eitel says. "The old clichés of painting at night with a bottle of wine, taking drugs
and being excessive - a lot of people in Düsseldorf think this is what it means to be an artist." In Leipzig, being a
painter means working slowly and deliberately, like Rauch, to produce 15 or 20 canvases a year.
Rauch's paintings are, in Robert Storr's words, "Völkisch and science-fictionish." They speak a Pop Art idiom with
an East German accent. With their faded and thinly painted colors, anachronistically costumed figures and spatially
disorienting landscapes, they recall the paintings that the American artist R.B. Kitaj made in London from the mid60's to the mid-70's. Kitaj, however, is a highly cerebral artist, and his paintings seem to carry endnotes as copious as
the ones T.S. Eliot appended to "The Waste Land." Even though Rauch's paintings are also informed by history,
especially art history, they resemble dreams that are receding from consciousness. "What Neo Rauch does is borrow
themes and take imagery from the Socialist Realist paradigm," Joachim Pissarro says. "Along with that, there is a
surrealistic quirkiness and bizarreness. You see simultaneous scenes that are not connected, that you as a viewer
cannot pin down or put a name on. The characters never confront each other, either. There is a sense of isolation that
goes on in his picture space." Lately, Rauch's canvases have become even stranger and more complex, as the
uniformed characters from the 50's and casually garbed people of today are joined by 18th-century soldiers, peasants
and dandies, and occasionally by fantastic animals, all displayed in luridly lighted landscapes with multiple
vanishing points. Wildly theatrical, the paintings demand that the viewer's eye jump nervously to take in
concurrently played, weirdly suggestive but ultimately inexplicable activities.
Indeed, Rauch constructs his paintings like a theater director, first daubing in the backdrops. "It is important to create
a definite environment or stage on which things can happen," he says. "For me, the function of painting as I
understand it is to work with myths. I try to create a widespread system where impulses are trapped. With an analytic
understanding, you can't grasp it." He hastens to clarify that he does not indulge in "psychological automatism." He
begins with a general notion of the mood and subject of the painting. "Having set the fundamentals, the stage, I
introduce the actors on the stage," he explains. "Then it happens - when I set the inhabitants into a relation, I am not
able to plan. In between the figures, and in between the figures and me, subtle relations start to be created. A
microclimate comes into being." Rauch blends rigorous precision with foggy mysticism, a brew that is very German.
"It seems to me that I am drawn back further and further, that elements from distant periods are knocking on the door
and want to be let in," he says. "That is also reflected in my dreams, that I am drawn back to earlier lives. The
incarnation cycles are trying to reach formulation." Asked if he believes that he led previous lives, he replies: "Not as
direct as that, but I have recurring dreams in the same rooms and same houses and same streets. What you see in the
picture is not the dream but a new version of the dream, like from a recycling plant."
ong before assuming the role of Rauch's dealer, Gerd Harry Lybke worked as his nude model. "He was a little bit
thinner then," Rauch recalls. "And he had a lot of Afro-look hair, like Jimi Hendrix." At 44, Lybke now has thinning
red hair and a penchant for pinstriped three-piece suits, but his dancing eyes, protruding lower lip and the space
between his front teeth still give him the look of a mischief-loving child. It was his boyhood resemblance to the
redheaded, freckled and gap-toothed character Jody on the American television show "Family Affair" that won him
his lifelong nickname. Western television may have been forbidden in the G.D.R., but it seems that everyone in
Leipzig watched it. "When I would walk out, people would say 'Judy, Judy,"' he recalls. "The name was 'Jody,' but a
Saxonian couldn't say 'Jody.' Nobody in East Germany knows that 'Judy' is a woman's name."
Lybke says that he stumbled into the art world almost by chance. What he really wanted to be was a cosmonaut. "I
was young," he says. "To be a cosmonaut, why not?" He did so well in science and mathematics that he was awarded
a five-year scholarship to study in the Soviet Union. When he realized that he dreaded the prospect of leaving
Leipzig for Kiev, he turned down the honor and his troubles began. "From this moment, nothing," he says. "It was
forbidden for me to study, even to work in a museum. I was on a blacklist." In 1981, having exhausted all
conventional options, he found a daily gig as a life model at the Leipzig academy. At a monthly salary of 300 marks
(considerably less than $100 but ample for his needs), he continued there for more than eight years, until the wall
came down.
Lybke's career as an art dealer began in 1983, when he opened in his (shared) apartment the only private gallery in
Leipzig. He called it Eigen + Art, a pun that means both "your own art" and "weirdness." Eigen + Art in those days
was a lark, not a business. "I opened the gallery naked, saying, 'Welcome to the Galerie Eigen + Art,"' Lybke recalls.
"I had real dreadlocks, from not washing my hair, and three bird eggs in the hair. After this opening, I met a few
good-looking girls, and I said, 'Why not do this again?"'
To make the transition from an East German life, in which sex, alcohol and friendship were the markers of success,
to a capitalist system governed by cash, Lybke recognized early that he would have to court international collectors.
He borrowed money from a West German industrialist so he could take work to the Art Frankfurt fair in 1990. He
opened temporary galleries in Tokyo in 1990, in Paris in 1991 and in New York in 1993 - the same year that he
began showing Rauch's work. To establish a permanent Eigen + Art in the capital of the reunified Germany, he
found a reasonably priced rental in the Mitte district of Berlin in what was then an out-of-the-way location but is now
the heart of the gallery district.
In 1997, when Rauch began to win international recognition, his fashionable peers in Leipzig were conceptual and
installation artists. That soon changed. The next generation of painters, many of them originally Westerners drawn to
Leipzig by its traditional education, stayed for the cheap rents and relaxed pace of life. In 2001, a group of them
banded together to start the Liga Gallery in Berlin, a cooperative with a limited two-year run. Although he had no
financial interest in the Liga Gallery, Lybke served as its godfather, recruiting a director, Christian Ehrentraut, and
sending over collectors. The Rubells, for example, made their big investment in Liga artists after futilely trying to
buy a Rauch. (Since then, they have acquired three Rauch paintings.) Lybke also monitored the gallery as a kind of
farm team and took on three of the artists following the closing of the Liga Gallery. He shepherds their careers like
an attentive, sympathetic older brother.
Both the diversity and the group affinities of the New Leipzig School are evident in the Rubell exhibition that is at
Mass MoCA until April 2 and then travels to Santa Fe, Washington, Seattle and Salt Lake City. Like their mentor,
Rauch, the young Leipzig artists often construct their pictures as theatrical sets. Matthias Weischer typically paints
empty rooms that bear the palpable presence of the absent occupants. In "Bisected," a two-panel painting of a room
corner that is bare except for a pinned-up picture of a nude woman, he has built up the surface of the brown wall in
layers of paint and then scored, smeared and encrusted it. A more ambitious picture, "St. Ludgerus," recreates a room
that is fully furnished in a late-20th-century style and, at the same time, offers a refresher course in 20th-century
painting: the window shade and lampshade are color stripes; the triptych window panels are Abstract Expressionist
splotches; the bouquet and wall sconces are drawn on white canvas like elements in a Matisse; and a hanging picture
of a house represents the realist tradition. Meanwhile, the awkward, alienated youths in Christoph Ruckhäberle's
stagy paintings occupy spaces that recall the streetscapes of de Chirico and Balthus. Not that these artists ignore art
forms that are younger than painting. Martin Kobe's elaborate architectures, graced by Escher-ish illusions and
painterly smears, combine the artificial reality of video games with abstract brushstrokes. Of the group, Tilo
Baumgärtel owes the most obvious debt to Rauch's dreamscapes, an influence he is escaping by eschewing color in
his large charcoal drawings, like the one the Rubells acquired of two people in an urban room, somewhere in Asia,
that is dominated by illuminated octopus tanks.
A great deal has changed in Leipzig in the past few years. Lybke has become a wealthy, powerful art dealer. Rauch
is a newly appointed professor at the academy, succeeding his own teacher, Rink. ("A very Prussian notion of duty,"
he says. "I've let myself be taken into service.") Saatchi is telephoning Matthias Kleindienst, a Leipzig gallery owner
who scouts young talent, to buy paintings. All of the original Liga artists have waiting lists for their work. The
commercial success of the formerly outcast medium of painting has, according to Rauch, produced "a very negative
climate," so that "even in the early years of starting out," the artists are "considering the market."
Yet some things seem not all that different. In October, Weischer won the Leipziger Volkszeitung prize, the same
award that, eight years earlier, catapulted Rauch to prominence. And although Weischer already commands a devout
following, the event still had the flavor of a coming-of-age ritual. There was a reception at the museum, with the
requisite Champagne and canapés, that inaugurated an exhibition of new paintings, in which Weischer has
incorporated humanoid (if not quite human) forms for the first time. After that staid event, many of the guests walked
across the street, where, in one of Leipzig's unoccupied buildings, an alternative project space called Laden für
Nichts (Shop for Nothing) was the setting for a party. "I don't know why there were so many gallerists at our party,"
the multiply-pierced painter Francisca Holstein said a couple of days later. True, there were, and at least one foreign
journalist. The party lasted until 5 or 6 in the morning. And the next day, the Leipzig painters were back at their
easels.
Arthur Lubow, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about Clive Gillinson, Carnegie Hall's new director.
Bazon Brock: Standing and shamming – Death Reflexes,
Tilo Baumgärtel – Senzo, 2006, Kerber / galerieKleindienst, 5-8.
I
r1
t.
,4
Bazon Brock
Sta./iaf,
ond,
Al an increasing rate metropolitan reporters wam
ucabour Manen\ rhelerrorof road.rdFpa'krn8 Sounders of wild boars vandalise suburban gardensr
squadrons ot pigeons spread bacteria and defecate
on fullu rdl henraCF as sFllas rt, carerakcr.:amre(
of rats occupy the sewers.
ln the black channels that form the educational faciliti€s oflelevision. shows concerned with animal life
in our metropolises have already gained the status
of exoiic iravel repofts.This perspective on our closer urban environment was initially developed by
thelegendaryanimal documentaryfilmmakerFritz
Stern, who made urban space feel like a place ,god
knows where., He adhered to the so-called anthropological turn. which conceived human cultures as
sorrF'rFs Fsrablr(hFd
Ihe slruggle to.urvrrp. rn
'n with other
particular by comparison
evolutionary
lifefonns. such as animals.
lntoxicated bv the belief in progress which characterised early modernity. itwas commonly taken for
granred that human triumph would lie in a continuously increased distance to animals. lt was assumed
rhat only humans possessed both consciousness
and the ability to use lools and languages.The turn
towards an anthropological perspective soon disinregrared rhi. ficrion ol human cxrsrcnce ds a singu.
larity.
In consequence, the similarities in the formation of
life and the interplay ofcells. organs. neuro-physio
logical interactions and lhe like became the cenlre
ofinterest. Forthese discoveries humans were most
indebted to animals. Research conducted with ani,
mals, including terrible vivisection, had eventually
led to insights into the naiure of the human organism. Of course, this was not wid€]y appreciated.
I nr,lroday rou wrll ne'rher frnd scienusrc prarsinB
their research animals. nor popular cxlts praying tor
forgiveness to the spirit oflife
its animalshape.
It is abouttime to erect altars in 'n
the slaughterhouses.
It is there that the ministers ofagriculture and their
nail of civilsFflanr\ should. on a monrhly ba\i<. (r'
for forgiveness of our share in the everyday mass
murder. Hunters, as long as th€y are more than affected braggans depraved by affluence, on the other
hand. acknowledge an animal s death. And there
are also news of alarmingly radical protests against
animal testing.
But the most lasting insiructions ro the ritual celeb,
ration of brother animal and sister plant still come
kom painrer\ and wrirer\ rromrhera\Fdra$rng\
ofLascaux to Franz Marc, from Aesop to Hermann
Lons Mummelmann andThomas Mann s,H€rrund
Hund,,thefiarratorsof fablesandtheponraitisisof
animals have shaped our perception of the unity of
brother animal and sisterplant most deeply.
The celebrations of James Ensor Herben A€hternbusch and Manin Kippenberger appearto be ofthe
greatest importance to me - all three have depicted
the frog at the cross, an imitatio christi. As the wit-
5h.q,nmiq-De!.t'Re4.e,€
nesses at the crucifixion saw the development of
violence on the body ofihe human son,likewise do
the scientists obseNe their innuence on the Iiving
body of the frogs or otherwise the disjecta membra,
the severed limbs and exposed organs.
Under these circumstances we want to show our
respect for the support of the spawning migration
of frogs and, standing next to that trap fence erected
lor rhe proredion of rhe human rlnpFrsonarors rn
lhe labordlones of rhe ncuroph)srologrsrs. promi\e
to donate to animal rights groups. If we are. however more concerned with thetwilight ofhumanity
following the latest climate changes in our civilisa-
iion, we should rather look to the iconographic
force and vision of anisE such as Tilo Baumgiinel.
Doing so in order to prepare us for what is apparently seeking to rule the Eafth, an open secret of
the blockbusters featuring King Kong or mutated
spiders. Minotaurs,Centaurs and the lalest creations
of genetic engineers.
Baumgartel shows the nighttime intrusions of the
animals into the abandoned human habitats. Marrens invade kio.ki or .ear, h for lo.r humanrr) on
longjoumeys through the waste land. where there
are still humans. as in the transition zones bet$€en
our world and the underworld. between arrival al
the end and departure for the void. animals become
conspicuous r€minders, whose eerin€ss can never
bp resolved by the previously etleclive qh slLng in
the woods or singing at the cradle. On the conrran.
rhF flow ol roic$ seem. ro srmu.arp rhe rsrnrns
plantsi the denser the vocalized attempts ro locare
yourself b€come, the more impenetmble grolv the
plants.
But to remain silent and steal away from the collapsing new buildings onto the promising deck of a ship
settingsailfor nowhere. appears hopeless from the
very beginning. Ev€q'body knows that your onl!
option not to be surprised by death is to feign it.
Comfortingas it might beto pidur€ BaumgAftel qandering in the traces of Reinecke Fuchs or Dr Grzimek.
so unsettling are his retellings of our defeats to the
white whale of evolution and the horror oftransformarion rhar Kafha ordarns Gregor Sam\a rD expcn.
ence for us all. Baumgafel's disposition to put his
artistic skills at odds in selfexperiments at the open
psyche, instead of marketing masterly demonstrations of his capabilities is admirable. what is this
massive experiment?
Baumgartel offers an opponunity to treat pictures.
or anefads in general.like animals. since humans
may only through unity with animals ensure their
self-assertion as survivors. communication with animals is becoming increasingly important for the will
to live. Psychologists hav€ long reported the indispurable cuc(ess dchreved by autistic children in.ociety of dolphins. or by sick, aged and lonely people in
living together with pets:an increase of self-aware-
.
Bazon Brock
Dufdl !aar.!.t! u^dTobf.&ttfi" - Sta'dta? qnd '-
sFalegi€s and percpectives is
lebensllhi€e nur noch aus der Einheit mit den Tle' The exchang€ of such
symbolic€tly bet$len humaj$'
ren bezieh; kainnen, wird dr€ Kommumkation mit alwavs communicated
tabrics of signs, such as pEintings. There
ihnen immer wichtiger fia die Behauptlmg des men' thb;gh
need to charge their pictues with an .
schlichen Lebensttillens. Psychologen berichten lorc Dainters
force. tuming them into analoges for a life
dariiber seit langeE und der E folg ist unbcstritten' emp;atic
.ten altistische Kinder in der Gemeinschaft mit otherthanyourovtn.BauEgAnel'sftcommmdstion'
for the cunEnt situauon is thut everyDelphine! erzielen oder Krank€. Ahe und Einsame and instruction
themselves via domestication
iffcdbe
im zussmmenleben mil Haustiecn en€icheD: Das one should
and cqts. so thet in the moondogF
martens,
into
lat$
Ers€bnis ist die SteigBrutg der Selbstwahmehmung
you can b€ save in the know'
futurc
the
world
of
light
D;der Audawch ober solche Strategien und Perby these animal
repr€s€nted
you
will
be
that
ledge
sDektiven zwischen den Menschen symbolisch
companions.
;oEt, also in Z€ichengeflrg€n wie Bildem. sollte
eben di€6en Bildem von den Malem iene emphatische
lkaft mitsegeb€n w€!dm'
die sie zu Analoga
fiir
anderes Leben als das eiggne machen. Baumgiinels
Empfehlung und Anleitung dazu heiBt' jetzt miigB
sic; iederrechE€itig in Ratten Marder. Hunde und
Katz€n durch Domestikation einscht€ib€n. damil
er sich in der Zukunft vermondeter\lblt dulch eben
diese tierischen C€noss€n !"ertrcten wei8.
Gregory Volk: Figuring the New Germany,
Art in America, 06/2005, 154-157.
Manuela Thieme: Dschungel-Tour,
Das Magazin, 10/2005, 46-53.
THEMA
Meister Immendorff und seine Frau
Jörg Immendorff (60), Malermeister aus Düsseldorf
und immer für Kontroversen zu haben, verlor durch
eine unheilbare Krankheit die Macht über seine Hände.
Seine Frau Oda Jaune (25), Foto rechts, war Meisterschülerin bei ihm und malt verstörende Bilder verletzter Seelen
GESPRÄCH
Dschungel-Tour
Text: M A N U E L A T H I E M E Fotos: O L I V E R M A R K
Düsseldorf und Leipzig nennen sich gern deutsche Malerhauptstadt. Sie konkurrieren
um prägende Stile, um entscheidende Debatten, um mediale Aufmerksamkeit.
Die Düsseldorfer Jörg Immendorff und seine Frau Oda Jaune hatten Tilo Baumgärtel,
Leipzig, zu Gast. Keine Sorge, es wurde kein Schaukampf
DAS MAGAZIN 47
GESPRÄCH
Nachmittagsbesuch
Zwei Männer, eine Frau. Sie reden sofort über ihre
Arbeit, die Malerei. Der Leipziger hatte Lust, den
berühmten Düsseldorfer Kollegen und seine Frau
kennenzulernen, und ist mitgekommen.
Jörg Immendorff sitzt auf einem rollenden Bürostuhl, er kann sich kaum noch bewegen. Keinen
Pinsel mehr halten, keine Zigarette allein anzünden.
Die unheilbare Nervenkrankheit ALS nimmt ihm
die Kraft. Ein Maler, dem die Hände nicht mehr
gehorchen. Auch wenn es dramatisch klingt, da ist
man schnell bei Beethoven, der am Ende nichts
mehr hörte. Immendorff hat sich seit der Schicksalsnachricht in einen wuchtigen Rausch gearbeitet.
Die Frist, die die Ärzte ihm gaben, ist schon mehrmals verstrichen. Das riesige Atelier steht voller
neuer Bilder, die noch fertig werden müssen.
Jörg Immendorff thront geradezu auf seinem
Stuhl. Konzentriert, aufrecht, energisch. Schnoddrig und witzig schiebt er Fragen beiseite und macht
seinen Anekdoten Platz. Die neuere deutsche Kunstgeschichte ist sein biographisches Terrain, durch
das er nur zu gern spaziert: bei Beuys studiert, dann
als Maoist den Revoluzzer vom Dienst gegeben. Mit
Richter, Polke, Lüpertz, Baselitz um Ruhm duelliert.
Ost-West-Missionar gewesen, mit dem Leinwandanarchisten Penck aus Dresden gemeinsam gearbeitet. Heiner Müller getroffen, Bernhard Heisig & Co.
»Kumpaneikunst« vorgeworfen. Den Lebemann gegeben. Die Kokain- und Sexparty, die ihn vor einiger
Zeit vor Gericht brachte, hat das exzentrische Image
noch mal etwas aufgefrischt.
Ein Immendorff ist nicht kleinlaut. Er strahlt,
lästert, plaudert sich durch die Vergangenheit. Seine
Präsenz ist enorm. Der kraftlose Körper wirkt in diesen Momenten nicht mehr ohnmächtig. »Es geht
mir einigermaßen gut«, hatte der Maler am Anfang
klargestellt und wollte kein Wort weiter über die
Krankheit reden. Es gibt Wichtigeres mitzuteilen:
Die Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin bilanziert jetzt
sein Lebenswerk. Immendorff ist gerade 60 geworden. Natürlich freut ihn die Ehre, aber er will nicht
vorzeitig über die Schlußlinie gewunken werden.
Auch wenn man ihn Altmeister aus Düsseldorf
nennt, reagiert er eher ungehalten. Jungstar aus
Leipzig klingt nicht besser, aber wie auch immer:
Tilo Baumgärtel sitzt jetzt vor Immendorff. Der
48 DAS MAGAZIN
33jährige gehört mit seinen lichten wie geheimnisvollen Bilderwelten zu den gefeierten Neuentdeckungen der letzten Jahre. Ein freundlicher, behutsamer Mensch, der sehr genau denkt. Baumgärtel mag, was Immendorff erzählt, er mag auch,
was er malt: Vor allem die »Adlerpartitur« hat es ihm
angetan. Eine Allegorie auf die deutsche Einheit,
eher fatal in der Diktion. Lange hat Jörg Immendorff
politische, historische Stoffe bevorzugt. Erst seit ihn
der Tod bedrängt, wirkt er mystischer, vager.
Auf dem Boden, vor dem Arbeitstisch, steht ein
knallroter Plastikkasten mit bunten Tasten. Daneben liegt eine Sandkastenschaufel und ein selbstgebasteltes Puppenhaus. Die Spielecke seiner vierjärigen Tochter Ida. Immendorffs Frau, Oda Jaune, ist
25 und war seine Meisterschülerin. Eine zarte, nachdenkliche Frau, die verstörende Bilder mit großer
Suggestion malt. Tilo Baumgärtel ist regelrecht begeistert: »Sie ist noch so jung und schon so reif.
Eigentlich schon fertig, das ist absolut ungewöhnlich.« Oda Jaune stammt aus Bulgarien, den Künstlernamen hat sich ihr Mann ausgedacht. Er schenkte
ihr einen Paß, der sie zur Bewohnerin eines geheimen Reiches macht: Gynthiana. Ibsen ließ Peer
Gynt im Traum ein Wüstenland fruchtbar machen.
Die drei also, Immendorff, Jaune und Baumgärtel,
verbrachten einen kurzen, ziemlich versöhnlichen
Nachmittag miteinander.
Gespräch im Atelier
Immendorff: Freut mich, daß Sie da sind.
Baumgärtel: Bevor ich hierher fuhr, saß ich mit Neo
Rauch im Garten zusammen. Ich soll unbedingt
herzliche Grüße ausrichten.
Immendorff: Das ist ja wie beim Gewerkschaftstag.
Wunderbar. Weiter.
Baumgärtel: Na ja, es wird ja immer so getan, als
mögen wir Leipziger die Düsseldorfer nicht.
Jörg Immendorff, Oda Jaune, Tilo Baumgärtel.
Der Leipziger stellte im geräumigen HinterhofAtelier beeindruckt fest: Wer große Türen hat,
kann auch riesige Bilder malen. In seinen Leipziger Räumen wird’s ab 2,50 Meter Rahmenhöhe
schwierig, sagt er
Immendorff: Das ist natürlich grober Unfug. Mir ist
doch klar, daß ich nicht die Endmarke der Malerei
bin. Ich lasse mich gern fesseln von anderen Gedanken- und Formwelten. Anfangs war ich noch
etwas ungnädiger, als es hieß: Die Malerei wird neu
erfunden. Das hat mich schon geärgert. Was sollen
dann meine ganzen Bilder sein? Da habe ich erst mal
ganz schön gestichelt gegen die angeblichen neuen
Wunderknaben, ich kann ja ein böser Finger sein.
Dann habe ich mich aber gefragt, warum wehrst du
dich eigentlich so dagegen? Ist es nicht wunderbar,
daß wieder neue Positionen entstehen und wachsen? Solange man sich aufregt und es Gründe dafür
gibt, muß ja was dran sein. Das Schlimmste, was einem Maler oder Bild passieren kann, ist ja: Du gehst
dran vorbei.
Immendorff sitzt am Tisch. Das Telefon klingelt. Die
Freisprechschaltung ist an. Es geht um die Bildnumerierung für die Berliner Ausstellung. Ein Glas Wasser
mit Strohhalm steht in Reichweite seines Mundes. Er
bittet seine Frau, ihm eine Zigarette anzuzünden und
DAS MAGAZIN 49
GESPRÄCH
zwischen die Lippen zu schieben. Als das Gespräch
beendet ist, sagt Immendorff: Entschuldigung, wir
waren bei den Leipzigern, glaube ich.
Jaune: Ich bin naturgemäß neugierig. Alles, was von
Künstlern meiner Generation kommt, studiere ich
auf die Frage hin: Gibt es die Möglichkeit für ideelle
Bündnisse? Teilen sie mit mir die Leidenschaft auf
der Suche nach einem neuen Bildtypus? Spüre ich in
ihrer malerischen Arbeit Zorn und Ungeduld? Passiert in einem jungen Künstler eine Revolte? Die
Region, die Stadt, das Land sind für mich zu kurze
Horizonte. Von den jungen Leipzigern kenne ich
noch nicht viele. Einige habe ich mir angeschaut.
Am Anfang hatte ich zum Beispiel Probleme mit
Neo Rauch. Es gibt ja viele Chiffren, die man kennen
muß. Jetzt habe ich mich da reingeguckt. Aber ich
finde, ihr seid euch gar nicht so ähnlich, daß das alles
zusammen als »die Leipziger« abgehandelt werden
kann.
Baumgärtel: Uns nervt, daß wir von außen in so eine
Gruppe gesteckt werden. Ich kenne niemanden, der
als Vertreter der »Neuen Leipziger Schule« durchs
Land laufen möchte. Man möchte rufen: Stop, hört
doch mal auf! Aber es ist so bequem. Man hat die
Figuren schön zusammengestellt, und wenn sie
einem nicht mehr passen, kann man sie mit einer
Ladung Schrot auch wieder vom Tisch holen, ohne
extra zu zielen.
Tilo Baumgärtel
Ohne Titel, 2003
50 DAS MAGAZIN
Der 33jährige, einer der hochgehandelten jungen
Leipziger Maler, ist keineswegs übergeschnappt:
»Die Sammler pokern einfach. Man kommt sich
manchmal vor wie beim Pferderennen.«
Der gebürtige Leipziger hat das letzte Jahr weitgehend pausiert und kümmerte sich um das neue
Baby der Familie
Immendorff: Also Baselitz, Penck, Lüpertz, ich – die
neuen Expressionisten wurden wir damals genannt.
In den 80er Jahren wie auch heute ein falscher
Begriff. Aber Etiketten gibt es immer. Irgend jemand
braucht die offenbar, zum Glück fallen die nach
einer Weile vom Gurkenglas wieder ab. Was bei diesem Gruppengerede völlig unterschätzt wird: Man
fetzt sich auch untereinander, es gibt Eifersüchteleien. Hauptsache ist aber am Ende, daß man es in
künstlerische Produktion umsetzt.
Jaune: Natürlich muß die Auseiandersetzung mit
den Kollegen sein, muß man die angebliche Szene
kennen, um den Informationsfluß am Laufen zu
halten, aber für mich ist das Atelier das eigentliche
Zentrum. Gut ist es, wenn ich mit Immendorff über
seine Erfahrungen sprechen kann. Generell finde ich
es nicht wichtig, ob die Kunst von jungen oder älteren Menschen stammt. Biologie spielt keine Rolle in
der Kunst. Ich bin froh, wenn ich ein Bild sehe und
nichts über den Maler weiß. Ich will vom Bild überrascht werden. Manchmal ist es viel jünger als sein
Schöpfer, manchmal ist es auch umgekehrt.
Baumgärtel: Ich mag das auch nicht, zu wissen, wer
da eigentlich malt. Wenn man einen Kollegen als
Mensch sympathisch findet, fehlt die Distanz zum
Bild, man überträgt die positive Sicht automatisch.
Jaune: Spätestens nach 100 Jahren müssen es die
Bilder sowieso allein schaffen. Wenn sie dann noch
jemanden berühren, dann bleiben sie.
Immendorff: Nachdem Beuys gestorben war, gab es
in Paris eine Ausstellung. Da saß ich mit Heiner
Müller im Café und habe mich geärgert, daß Beuys
plötzlich völlig überästhetisiert wurde. Ich habe
damals gesagt, man müßte ihn einschließen in ein
Pharaonengrab und ins Tal der Könige bringen. Die
Dinge ruhen lassen. Und wenn er nach 3000 Jahren
immer noch strahlt, wunderbar. Aber man ist immer zu vorsichtig. Gerade bei Freunden.
Baumgärtel: Ich habe eine Wand in meiner Wohnung, und wenn ich ein Bild male oder auch von
anderen ansehe, stelle ich mir immer die Frage:
Kann ich es dort hinhängen und damit leben?
Immendorff: Wenn ich morgens den Blick auf das
Bild von gestern werfe, sehe ich am ehesten, wo die
Schwächen liegen. – Junge, kannst du mir mal bitte
eine Zigarette in den Mund schieben?
Baumgärtel: Natürlich. – Ich will noch mal auf die
äußere Instanz von Freunden zurückkommen. Die
lass’ ich überhaupt nicht gelten. Das wäre ein Wirrwarr an Meinungen, oft sagen zwei Leute glatt das
Gegenteil. Da bleibt von mir nichts übrig.
Jaune: Mich stört’s, wenn alle reinreden und das Bild
noch gar nicht fertig ist. Wenn’s fertig ist, ändere ich
auch nichts mehr. Beim Malen gibt es ja irrationale
Eingebungen, die im Widerspruch zum denkerischen Bilderplan stehen. Ich finde, Gott sei Dank ist
das so, sonst wäre man ganz schnell einer Rezeptur
auf der Spur. Ungehorsame Ateliergeister sind die
besten Mitbewohner.
Immendorff: Ich will andere hören. Ich bin süchtig
nach Kritik, das liegt an meiner maoistischen Erziehung. Zugleich hasse ich es auch, wenn man
mich niedermacht. Mich hat wirklich geärgert, als es
hieß, die Malerei sei durch die Leipziger neu erfunden worden. Ich meine, ich kenne euren Ex-Professor Arno Rink auch noch aus Vorwendezeiten. Alle
waren noch in Deckung, und Jakobiner wetzten ihre
Messer. Rink hat damals zugesehen, daß er nichts
falsch macht. Später stellte er sich hin und sagte: Er
wollte schon immer die Leipziger Schule in die Welt
tragen. Ich glaube, angesichts seiner Schinken sollte
er lieber den Ball flach halten. Genauso der Heisig.
Helmut Schmidt hat ihn damals das Porträt malen
lassen für die Kanzlergalerie. Ein Auftrag für Penck,
das wäre ein Statement gewesen. Adenauer lag da
besser mit Kokoschka. Daß Heisig einem Mörderregime so zu Diensten war, das stört mich wirklich.
Abgesehen vom Mittelmaß seiner Arbeiten.
Baumgärtel: Uns wirft Heisig vor, daß wir nur noch
an den Erfolg glauben. Die Ideologien seien zusammengebrochen, und was bleibt, ist das Geld.
Immendorff: Was heißt eigentlich Erfolg, das müßte
man endlich mal definieren. Ich sage meinen Studenten immer: Mit einer guten ökonomischen Ausstattung malst du noch keine guten Bilder. Und was
spricht dagegen, mal eine Zeitlang besser zu verdienen. Ich habe keine moralischen Probleme mit Geld.
Für mich ist Erfolg aber was anderes: Wir wollen
künstlerische Positionen weiterbringen, eine Debatte entfachen. Ich zumindest. Ich fand immer komisch, wenn sich jemand nicht für die Umstände
interessiert, in denen er lebt. Das fängt in der Mensa
an, wenn’s dort schlechtes Essen gibt. Und hört auch
nicht auf, wenn jetzt das Kultusministerium in NRW
abgeschafft wird. Ich erinnere mich noch genau an
meine erste politische Aktion: Ich hatte ein Blatt
Papier und sagte: »Bitte unterschreiben Sie hier
gegen den Vietnamkrieg.« Beuys trug sich ein, Polke.
Am Ende hatte ich vier lächerliche Unterschriften
DAS MAGAZIN 51
GESPRÄCH
Die Assistenten
Seit Jörg Immendorff nicht mehr selbst malen kann,
ist er zum Komponisten geworden, wie er sagt.
In seinem Kopf entsteht die Sinfonie der Bilder,
er dirigiert Assistenten, die die Striche nach seinen
Vorstellungen setzen. An berühmten Vorbildern
fehlt es ja nicht: Michelangelo hat die Sixtinische
Kapelle auch nicht allein ausgepinselt
und wußte nicht mal, wohin ich die Liste schicken
sollte. Und als ich mit Hausbesetzungen anfing, da
war Dutschke schon mit roten Fahnen am Horizont.
Langweile ich euch eigentlich mit diesen alten
Storys?
Baumgärtel: Nein, im Gegenteil. Ich bin eher neidisch. Das sind wenigstens noch Geschichten.
Immendorff: Meine Studenten klagen immer: Ihr
hattet es gut, ihr hattet noch die großen Weltblöcke,
echte Feindbilder. Ich kann nur sagen: Jubelt doch,
ihr habt komplizierte Feindbilder, das ist viel reizvoller, ergiebiger. Die Seuche ist in den Poren, ihr
könnt eigentlich nur Kampfkunst machen. Natürlich nicht mit Demotransparenten auf den Bildern.
Wer sagt denn, daß Protest, Zorn laut sein muß.
Aber daß etwas passieren muß, da bestehe ich drauf.
Nur den Schlappi machen, das lass’ ich nicht durchgehen.
Baumgärtel: Mir reichen in Bildern Signale, Haltungen, Zitate. Mir reicht es, in eine gedankliche Strömung zu kommen. Das geistige Niveau ist wichtig.
In dieser herunterdemokratisierten, abgeflachten
Mediengesellschaft ist Niveau als Gegenbewegung
wichtig. Da brauche ich keine Botschaft.
Jaune: Jedes Bild berührt jeden Betrachter anders. Es
gibt keine verbindliche Botschaft für alle. Ich gebe
meinen Bildern deshalb auch keine Titel. Ich will die
Wahrnehmung nicht in irgendeine Richtung steuern. Im Moment besteht für mich die größte Herausforderung darin, Themen auszuloten, die meinen
innersten Gefühlen entsprechen. Weg mit der vorschnellen Frage: »Was soll das?« Ich will das surrealistische Experiment. Ich will mich auf dieser Suche
selbst überraschen können. Eins ist aber klar: Ich
will meine Zeit nicht vergeuden mit privater
Selbstbespiegelung.
Das Telefon klingelt im Büro nebenan. Immendorff ruft
durch den Raum: Ist von der »Park Avenue« der veränderte Peymann-Text gekommen? Der Theatermann
schreibt über Immendorff, der Maler kann sich vor seiner Berliner Ausstellung über Mangel an Medieninteresse nicht beklagen. Der Assistent schüttelt den Kopf:
kein Fax da. Er bringt ihm eine Liste, die der Maler
überfliegt. Oda Jaune erzählt, das geräumige Hinterhof-Atelier sei früher eine Flaggenfabrik gewesen. Das
paßt zu Immendorff. Ein Mao-Porträt hängt über der
Tür. Über die Wand ist ein meterlanges rotes Banner
gespannt: »Professor Immendorff, willkommen an der
Akademie«. Auf Deutsch und Chinesisch. Zwischen den
Bildern und Installationen gibt es immer wieder kleine
Affenskulpturen, Immendorffs Fabelwesen. »15 Affen
für Ida« heißt ein neues Buch, das er seinem Töchterchen gewidmet hat. Eine Geschichte über die Suche nach
einem ganz besonderen Schatz. Schauplatz: ein Künstleratelier.
Immendorff: Oda, was sagst du?
Jaune: Na ja, ich habe sie natürlich inzwischen schon
oft gehört.
52 DAS MAGAZIN
Immendorff: Weiter geht’s. Ja, die Botschaften. Ich
sage immer, jeder von uns ist doch Pädagoge. Nicht
im üblichen Sinne. Aber jeder hat eine Verantwor-
Baumgärtel: Ich finde gut, wenn man als Künstler
eine klare Ansage macht. Aber dazu sind die Medien
da. Nicht die Bilder. Das wäre mir zu platt, zu plakativ. Kunst muß Dschungel bleiben. Politische Dinge
haben immer ästhetische Spuren und ethische Dimensionen. Das sieht man an der Nachkriegskunst.
Das sind keine Trümmerbilder, das sind ganz karge,
leere Szenerien. Ethik und Ästhetik berühren sich
an einem ganz tiefen Punkt. Und der ist viel interessanter, spannender, als eins zu eins ein Geschehen
darzustellen.
Immendorf: Es muß einen wie eine gewaltige Flut
mitreißen. Tübke ist vielleicht ein guter Handwerker, aber das ist es nicht. Da ist Matisse besser.
Baumgärtel: Man sieht, wieviel Energie Tübke da
reingesteckt hat. Jeder Mantel detailgenau. Ich denke
aber, der Aufwand muß immer im Verhältnis zum
Impuls stehen, der von einem Bild ausgehen soll.
Immendorff: Genau, korrekt. Ganz anders Velázquez mit seinen Seiden. Das ist hingetuscht. Da hat
der keine zehn Minuten gebraucht, aber es ist schon
ein Pollock. Vollkommen gültig. Wie der Helm von
Rubens. Da braucht man gar nicht mehr den bärtigen Mann. Der Helm hätte gereicht, mal salopp
gesprochen. So, ihr Guten, jetzt muß ich Feierabend
machen, ihr wißt, ich bin sehr geizig mit meiner
Zeit.
Jaune: Was hältst du davon, die Kollegen aus
Leipzig und Dresden zur Eröffnung deiner Berliner Ausstellung einzuladen?
Immendorff: Sollten wir machen. Ausstellungen & Kataloge
Jörg Immendorff: Male Lago – unsichtbarer Beitrag.
23.9. bis 22.1. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin,
Potsdamer Str. 50 / Oda Jaune: Aktuelle Arbeiten.
Herausgegeben von der Kunsthalle Koblenz /
Tilo Baumgärtel: Neue Arbeiten. Ab November,
Galerie Kleindienst Leipzig, Spinnereistr. 7
EVELYN RICHTER
Rückblick Konzepte Fragmente
M U S E U M DE R B I LDE N DE N KÜ N STE LE I PZIG
18. 9. – 20. 11. 2005
Katharinenstr. 10, 04109 Leipzig, Tel.: 03 41/21 69 90, [email protected], www.mdbk.de
Täglich 10 bis 18 Uhr, Mi 12 bis 20 Uhr, Mo geschlossen
DAS MAGAZIN 53
ANZEIGE
tung. Es braucht nicht das bewußte politische Manifest, ich muß mich nicht auf irgendeine Seite schlagen. Aber gleichgültig tun, da werde ich bockig.
Ken Johnson: Art in Review; Clara Park – Positions of Contemporary
Painting from Leipzig,
The New York Times, 09/24/2004.
ART IN REVIEW; 'Clara Park' -- 'Positions of Contemporary ...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501E4DF1...
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September 24, 2004
ART IN REVIEW; 'Clara Park' -- 'Positions of
Contemporary Painting From Leipzig'
By KEN JOHNSON
Marianne Boesky
535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea
Through Oct. 2
Once an official bastion of East German social realist painting, the Leipzig Academy of
Visual Arts continued to train artists in traditional techniques after the reunification of
Germany in 1990. This exhibition, organized by the Berlin curator Christian Ehrentraut,
presents works by eight academy graduates. It has the look and feel of a high-caliber student
show. (The title, ''Clara Park,'' refers to a place where the artists like to congregate when not
working.)
The spirit of Neo Rauch, the most successful Leipzig painter to emerge in recent years,
hovers over the show. None of the artists offer imagery as inventively fantastic as his, but his
influence is evident in Matthias Weischer's large, thickly squeegeed, drably colored
paintings of retro-modern rooms; David Schnell's vertiginous, strangely artificial
landscapes; and Martin Kobe's glowing, futuristic, semi-abstract architectural visions.
Of the four artists who focus on human figures, the most interesting are Tilo Baumg?el,
whose king-size charcoal drawings are like illustrations for supernatural mystery stories,
and Christoph Ruckh?rle, whose paintings of people in congested rooms suggest a simpler,
less angst-ridden Max Beckmann. The others are Franziska Holstein, who presents a large
painting of a photo album open to pages of baby pictures, and Stephanie Dost, who has
filled a whole wall with photographs, drawings and sketchy paintings depicting young,
attractive bohemians.
Tobias Lehner, the only completely abstract painter, makes large, hectic compositions
combining many different modes of application, from stenciling to splattering, which recall
the works of another East German, Gerhard Richter. KEN JOHNSON
1 of 2
22.01.13 12:16
Hans-Werner Schmidt: First encounters with Tilo Baumgärtel &
Harald Kunde: Uncertain Exit. Observations on the works of Tilo
Baumgärtel,
Tilo Baumgärtel – Hydroplan, 2002, Museum of Visual Arts /
galerieKleindienst, Leipzig, 5-13.
:=
.r::Jnlers
ylilh
lilo Balngerlel
- _'::::.s.n ofthe Annua li4eeiing i'r 2001 of the,Forderer des Museums d bldenden Kinste L€ipzis e.V. (,Associat on of
:: :::': Slpporiers of the lvuseum of F ne Arts Le pzig.), a ser es oi vis ts took place to the studios of young Leipzig a sts.
- : . : _:': r'orn d ffereni parts of the Federal Repub ic were posltively surprised by ihe scope of art stic idioms leaving a lasting
.!(ertly
to be found n Leipzig
ii
the c assica domanofpantngandihegraphicads.Padicularlyiheencounierwihthe
Balmgartel lead to a heightened inter€st in other p aces both in his oeuvre as we I as in ihe new generation of Dainiers n
::-- ::r b denden Kiinste Leipzig already purchased the picturc ,Begegnung{ (rErcounieft) by lllo Baumgart€ in sumrner 2001.
' -i: :' a t ght acquisitron budget, oLr prospects are by necessity dep€ndent on the risk ol purchasing adworks ai an early date, in
:i : r,r a be ng repeated y defeated if spite of end ess ca cu at ons in the hope of achieving addit onal lundiig by the financia
::_::::
:aJsed by tlre purchase of a s nge masterpiece.
:::::-,rg.
' ,'
::
-:
ct!res, ir whrch traffic breaks down and transport is tlansposed io more archaic states, and
:_ :ie ewer fully awake - is mad€ io exper ence rnovem€nt ahead as reminisceni of a nightmar sh state of tread ng on th€ spot,
:: r :h physical fatigue. Llke in a dream, rn which day and night consianily swiich, the p cture defies specific iempora deiinit on.
be
orgs to the group of snow
p
v
-i::.".rysuff!sedwthasobtemixtureoicoloursspentbythefullmoon,theNortlrernLightsandiheglowofBengal ights, disallows
:-:-::r ar ocating t in dayiime.
- ; ::-.1gartel's pa ntrngs are much sought.after. This s reflected by the numb€r of recent exh bitions and by th€ transierral of his works
_:: '--erous private co lections. Muse!m der bildenden Kiinst€ L€ipzig is able to attend to this growing interest due io ihe suppod of
_:._ 18. wh ch ce ebrat€s iis 10th anr versary this
: -:
On this occas on, it was thus decided that in collaboration with Museum
Vear.
-
: :.nden Kijnste Leipzig a priz€ for lp-and-coming young artists would be awarded every two years lrom now on. Compris ng an
::-:: r.. a cata ogue as wel asan acquisition for ihe [4useum d€r b ld€nden Krinste Lepzg, the prize s beneficial to adist and
::-- a rke, wh lsi a so lending add tiona esteem for its in tiator and sponsor, Sachsen LB.
":, r tirerefore like to €xt€nd my sincerest thanks to Sachsen LB and io al ihose who w€re actively involved in mak ng this decision
: : - the project's realisation
::-
: :: :rank the jury for conloin ng in ts resolute d€cision to award this yeals prize to T lo Baumgarte . I wou d also ike to express fiy
i :::-ae to Jeann€tt€ Stoschek for her reliabil ty and open rn ndedness throughout th€ proiecfs d€ve opment at wIus€um der bildenden
. '.:: Le pz g, as well as to l\Iatthias Kle ndienst for the passion and conf dence with which he performs h s pione€ring work as a gal ery
:
'._.'
n addition, my sincere thanks go to the lend€rs, ioo, for supporting the adist's I rsi museum exhibition.
-: ':-nd th ngs off, all of us ar€ obliged to lilo
-.::s the viewels gaze to inger, thus causing
:.
Baumga el for his having opened up before oLrr eyes a novel world of p ctures, wh ch
ihe d stance betw€en pictorial space and th€ aclual space surrounding the v€wer to
4ans Wenet Schnidt, Dircctot, Aluseun der bildenden KAnsrc Leipzig
Venezianishe Blitler 5 .
::seftalioN
on lhe worfts of Tilo
. :::.iiers
2001
Eaumg;rlel Do!bt
Tempera aul Pap er . 46
ess
x
31.5 cm
clustered around ihe art acadern
es n
Le
p, g and Dr€sden Saxony
n other p aces. art st c output rs deterrn n€d by far reach ng changes of parad gm irreconolable
:::.. rE and ihe lnt rirg. explo tai ve greed of the market, arnonB artists rn Le pz g ihere s€ems to preva I a particular
:: ._:e that places an urceasife tr!st rn pa nting as a coniemporarv medion; inde€d here pa nt ng was nev€r
prrportedlv be onged to a centurv Sone by
: ,::.4 n Rid cu ed n t rnes when descript ons such
Wlr
lst
death and its subsequeri reb rth bv each new gereration were celebrated, thrs
:::_:: ras taken noie of wthmuchstrprse after the reLrnflcaton of Germanv iva|dated ih€ verdict ol 'state at'
' , ".':nces became apparent urve ng a ! ew nto the h nterland of the avanlgard€i rf spite of be ng scre€n€d oif lrom
::::a nfluef.e ariists n this part of Gerrnany clairned ior thenrselves both a ceria n facel ous orrg na tvafdanassedive
: :. : .. : on R€fer€nces and e €ci ve afflnrt es heishtened a sefse ol be ong ng n LeipzLg to tlr€ tradrtron oi the svrnbo c
_:.r ! a th€ d stant grandmasters Eeckrnann, P casso ard Bacon. to the oLrterrnost ram trcations of the "Le pziger
_
; r.iei (vrestern)
painting's presumed
::
:: Le pzrg() rn Dresden, to the €xpressior sm of the ,Brijck€" and the eanv Penck, and to the parnier y sensua sm ol
:::i'_ru€r Heirmann and Gdsche . Apart irom dlosyncrat c sol tar es such as Altenbourg, C aus and Glackner, ilr s br ef ist
. :: :::i as ihe folndatron lpon wh ch lnaiiected by iime pa nt ng dev€ oped rn Saxonv However. Saxor pa nt ng on y
.r: :::.nt on w th artists alt c! ating d st ncirve p ctoria concepts, stch as Neo Ralch n the mid 1990s, and a lltle later'
rn Thomas Scherb tz. S!dd€nty ihe arnbrval€nt bonus of the exotic seened inval daied. Suddenly this partrc! ar
: i,: .ss,on on y slight y lagg ng behird ihe zeige st co! d apt J/ disclose condit ons deeper w(hir the predicarn€nt oi
:r:1 r'. ihe Lons tradii on ol paintrfs .t art academ es Ln Saxonv appeared as the verv prerequ s(e of the med um s
. .- :::
a
': ::.rorks
:
'::-:
nihisrnsprine
durngthefrna agorv of a co!ntrv with a po|i cal
and thls an eyewitness of fundamenta changes n al areas of |ie Balmgarte was
and cornpeirtrve en! ronrnent. Rars€d
:-.rmed to cave in on isel
-r:iscfu e fur crafrk und Buchkunsi Leipzig whef prec sely this rnsttution was rmp cated in reforms oi great socieial
rorhngseemedcedain:theeLphoriaofreformoftenturnediniothesoberaitltudeofthereformed,andonesfLrture
r, r :y no means be conf rmed. How€ver, ai the same t m€ there was mtch fr€edom Tlr s he ghtened the poientia mpact
- :i!,r aid subsequen|y necessitated art sts to focus more on th€ir own outpui. As Baumgadelwas nterested frorn the very
: ;:!rences and assoc at ve narraiion, he orig na lv experimerted w ih f rn and staged photographv Requ ring cornpara
-:-aley deterring technca equiprnent, ths nital phase was short ved Yei Baumgarte s mages have reta ned a
: :: ,::!re to th s day, occasional y resernbling pa nted f lm st lls The oppodun iies nh€rent io ihe 'anc ert' medlLm of
_
:::
rectangu ar canvas expanse prov€d more
-, fasc nate.l Baumgartel most, the quieter sensat ons to b€ had w ihrn th€
.-:-:rheoretca,na(atrveandforrnalconcerns.ThefactthattherehappenediobeapainiingcomebackiLstasBaurn
seems somewhat co nc dental. and doLrbiless accounts for herghiened attention ol h s work by
. :: - s srud es at art schoo
Aen. ll . 2oo2 . dl auf Leinwand .80 x60
cm
the (fashion oriented) art wortd. However, closer €xarninaiion of some exernplary works by Baumgadel shows that he nd€ed possess€s
highly ndividLral qualities as an adist.
A recurring theme appears to be a fear of ine''ria, being stLrck and rema ning stranded. ln dramatic scenarios, Baumgijrte sheds lght on
tempora y untimited aciions d sptaying whal Eazon Brock has caled th€ "eqoanimity oi the catastrophic.. Tra ns arc seen huding
throLgh btizzards to remain forever stuck in ihe snow Without wheels, bLrs wecks rest ,n peace upon brick p inihs. Boat tr ps ihrough
poisoned waters are frozen forever in the mom€nt of departure. Reduced to schematic outlines and hov€ring as f guided bv renrote contrcl'
Baumgartet s protagon sts are genera lly vei
ed
n a sh im mer
of tristesse. lt is noticeable that the figu res' dentit es con stantly sw tch There
s no flxed set of actors carrying out the actioni the figures each fo low ng a diflerent path - seem to be groping and searchirg for
(first experrenc ng the p cture as
something. tt seerns as if, atter a given moment, Baumg,rtel devotes h rnself who ly to finding an image
a ,b urred thoughi.) as welt as to the intrinsic demands of the mat€riaL, and is often surprised by the outcome The characier stic
openness ol this apprcach enables Baumgddet to move between artistic intuition and cornposiironal improvem€nt. and to thus evolve
pictures in cqmptex superimpostrons incorporating both sketchy outl nes and blocks oi colour. The res! iing p ctures are argely borne of
inner necess ty and are uniquety attainab e through tlre very process of painting. However, th s method also ant cipates ta ure as a
tegitimate resutt and consciously r€sists a I pressur€s of delivery: it ,ys cla m to the primacy of actual qua ty. Baumgarte thus avoids
both overhasty restrictions and rmmob lization due to preclpitate success. lndeed, he assumes a coLlnter-pos t or to lr s creaied cast of
fgures, whorn he dispatches
-
nhisplace-
nto the crisis of stagnation.
A btazingty neqn cotour scherne s a srgnature qua ity of Baurngadel's pictures. Diffuse fields ol p nk. chrome .x de green aid su phurous
yet ow radiaie over and beyond the recognizable o!tlines of oblects, rendering a I ghiing and atmosphere ak n to Tft3retto aid E Greco
WithoLri seekin€ hackneyed r€ferences to pa nt ngs ancestors, it deserves to be mentioned that s nce Baumga.te s s:ria arsh
p
n V€nice,
i.2
-: r: rrsh,p ,n h s p ciures between 1 g!rat on and surface rs predomrnaftly achreved by tlre hono!rab e teclrn q!e oi sfumato
: t..lrf qre wh ch tlrrouglr Gerha.d Rrchler's mastedr b urs rs a lar reach ng, cafon ca rif !eice on contemporary
:__i'.!crds the prob ng, approxrrnate natur€ oi B:rmg:irtels percept of of the wor d s rend€red con.r€te through a p ctor a
: : rsi.rms the repertory of the v s bly mater a nto a rea .n of personal expereice Th s rs part .! ar y ref ected by th€
: :. :_.ra.ienst c of many of the scenes wh ch somet mes ncorporate e emenis lrom , ustrat ons n ch ldren s.books: by th€
: ::riicance! deiermrn ng s ze and sc: e wrih n the pa nt ngs by emphas z ng the srblecirvely LrLrL,a anil byheghtefng
:'i:n se!uencesi and f i3 ly by the .a cu ated d .holomy ol oblect ve prec s or and tlre pa nt€rly drsso utron of form. Earm
: _::," methods wrth the a m of contur nB a 'crypt ca y po€t c. state. confroftrng us with the spec frc truth oi pa itrrg.
: : ::server to read beiween the lnes. to look between the lavers For, altholeh Baurng;riel stud es comrcs. photographs
:'::-i magesonada ybass he ns sG on the rneaf ngf! ness of the parnted ma8e wh ch rs loLrided w tlr n lsef
: ,re rg most apt y trafsport€d by and throrgh the nv€ntion ol su tab e forms
:.:r(:atl,,l!seumderbldefdefK!nsteLepzgontheoc.asonoitheSachsenLBAltPrz€,tscearthatBalmgart€
: .: these ,rteftrons rrto prrct ce Pari c! ar y the most recent grolp ol pa ni ngs. n wlr ch hydrop ares g rde over the
the banks of r vers. best exemp fy the drecton and locls ol Baurng;rtels magrnaton Searchers rove
: :: ,r..s. stumb e upon mock vesse s to caps ze and s,rk rfto the depths or it gro!nd evel are seen dr ving rboLrt
: ::: As nu t ply €clreloned composrt ois sliiLrsed by a mephri c lght. ihese tableaLrx exude the arcaneness oi complex
: : :s:ss a ir.ce ol know rg moLrrn ng; occas ofal y the bedro.k oi Saxon magery s fairtly v srb e. c osely ty ng llre
: ' rrat ves to an rdent I ably speof. env ronmeft. At ihe same trme however they seern to hover rn a state of
. : . _ ,_:..r:t . slate nwhrchalofTloBaumgartelsfglres:ct.Hrssearch€EVsbyperformtasks yeitheyhavero
: : :lae.voursorcrfal pa. or!tmateam I contrast, Balmgarte atteftrvely obsetues the lrustle and blsteof te
.'
: ,!,e.t ve v ewpo ni and w th an ufcedarr outcome cruc al moments ol chanEe and departtre
:
oer Urlauber
.
l
ooo F-pqaa.r Pap" 0
40
Ulrike Lorenz: Talk,
Tilo Baumgärtel, 2002, Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Hessen-Thüringen,
44-55.
intrcduc€d for the llßt time
Wirh Tilo Saumgärtel, born in r97r, a young LeiPzig-born painter is being
prom
inent Academy ofVisual
in Willingshausen, Cermany's oldest adists'colony Agraduateofth€
mgärtel's rcots lie deep in
Afts in his home town and a master pupil (until 2ooo) with Amo Rink Bau
then€tapho c painting ofthe LeiPzigerschool," which made its mark on 2oth centuryCeman_
with subversive
German art histo.) to a much lesser degree with solid Socialist Realism tha;
studyingth€ "anci€nt
Aftertraining as a machinist, BaumgärtelsP€nt the fißt Post'socialist decade
pincipleof paiiting,"confused butnotoverwhelm€d bvthen -media boom'whichstrcnglv
barclv30veaß old' h€
inRuerced the irternationalad sc€n€ duingjusl thos€v€aß ln the lat€ 9ot'
life 3nd nightmare
entered th€ scenewith develoPed ambiv.lent scena os th't balance eve'yday
na ative modeland autonomous
visions, pictoial woids that eristwithin the a.c oftension b€twe€n
with a renaissanceofthe laGe'
coupled
painting. ThetriumPhant comeback ofthe trad itional gen ß'
now fa'es th€ t'sk ofle'ming the sLlls
scale narratlve, again shifted the balance ot powei Baumgärtel
ad p zeofthestate
ofcopingwith prcgrammed ea v rccognition.ln a last few days h€ ßc€ived the
the
€nd ofthe v€ar at
for
eank ofiaxony; a llrst comprch€nsive on€-man show has be€n announced
the Leipzig t!4useum ofFineAds.
thediscussion
Bathed in the almon sPnitualglow ofthe light_grcen birch grcves in willingshausen'
on the late spring ev€ning of May
between theadist and the colony h€ld at Ge.had-von-R€utem-Haus
messagefrcm the inte'iorto
r66 promised a relaxed atmosphere in which to rcllect on painting as
banishmentof
the exterior world, on insplration as a formativ€ force, on ment'larchives and the
on the work ofTilo
everyd.y catastrcphes to fantastic painted stoies A discussion, thercforc'
ofthe medium "
Edmgärtel, someone forwhom Painting "is stillc!rent because ofthe simPlicity
sees the picturc'
level,''one
"oneio one, plcture and viewer, autho..nd picture'- encounteß at ele
looks away and the ßst takes Pl.ce insid€ one's head "
'
You envision myslerlous locales: u.ban landscaPes emptv ofPeoP
e siow covered paths
and woods
diverless locomotives, ghostllke patches offog pecu iar PeoPle The pictüres suggest that concrete
decode the
disasters or at least nysler ous acl ons arA äbout to unfo d A fi6t glance s noi e'oügh to
from
on
images
olact
a
story:fragments
y
remefrber
tentior llled atmosPhere. But the. we sudden
sutreal
a llmorthe news somethirgwe absorbed Peripheralvand noworlv halfrememberThese
shlmmering scenanos n midil2ed format ako co.fuse us because thev conte n chärged 'olor
surlaces, sepärate and autoiomous. Orgaioid forms ard float rg br!sh structures mark "gaps act
sure he'erthai
as dlsruptions by ro means attheforefio.t, but stilli.sisterl On y one thing seems
noth ng is clear That is what s ercitiig aboui Tilo BaumSärtels
f.
B.
Realisti., figurative,
u.
Palnling Howwould vou descnbe
nairatve canI sayadything moreaboutit lcan tdescribe
my Painting'
L,
Peüaps because then you would have to Paint
narratve thatyou envisior come lrom?
more. Butwheredoes
the kiid
ofron
rePresentative
T.8,
tdoesnt.omefrom o.e padicu arsource ilvares greatl Findinga picture s adifflcutthirg
especially because t s tied to wantirg When l/r,tto find a Picture, l'an t lt s ree lv a most
to express where the hspiration lor a p cture comes ftom Ma/be from a para lel
intel ectualworld where whät have seei ard thought is stored and where these things merge with
mpossib
e
eachotherThisdeveopssomehowintoasystemolunfocusedthoughts,astructurewthsürprising
.rossjefe.ences that lrtuitivev learn how to use often Perce ve this ur(onscious structuring as an
a reed for communication That is what I undersiand as a
resonator
One cannot co.tro .hance Chance events are decded bv
p.iic p e of
imagine t
a higherforce, adeterm niigforce.That sounds sp rtlal butlts rea lvt'ue at east as
And ihen one has the possibiity ofreProducing the form that one rece ved as resonance'
,rt st. event
and out
of t I develop
nspirat on. f,1an ls a
U. L.
To stay with thls image:you rece ve somethingthat you have
ro controlove( t grows irto
a swarm
picture Then the very sPecific
of
ind suicithoughts and chale.gesyou to commun cateihro!gh
paint ng process begi.s, wh ch has a dynam c ofits own. That mears that yo! may rotice at some
point that you can t go any lurther lt s poss ble that the ori8iia sense olirsp ratlor has aho alreadv
a
tB.
(wth ai amused smie)Yet,
Yes.
u.
l-.
Something is crcat€d on cenv.s that is no longer
-.
p.rtofyou but 6th€rfa.esyou. Somethingthat
you.nd.lso
demands rcspons€s fiom you.That's how I imagineth€ proc€ss ofpainting
constent reaction by the artist to wh.tever is taking place in fiont othim on th€ canvas- The pictur€
responds to
is creat€d within this "conveßation." Howdo€s
yourstudioand realizing,dammit,
I
thatwo*l
l'v€ also sen you dissatisfied
-
standing in
wantedsom€thingelse.
T.8.
Thafs kue. At nrstthe.e'sth€ purc canvas, this field, m.ybefourcubic met€6, white,virginal, €ternal
ice... (l.ughs softly) lt took a while beforc I lost th€ feeling of revercnce I us€d to hav€ - and stilldo, .
little. At filst ltrytoetpßss my.ough ideas ofa picture.Just as und€nned as m), idea is, lloosely hang
a noose
aro!nd the picture. Overth€ cou6eofdays, sometim€s w€€ks,lpullthe n@setogeth€r
tightly. Then I see what's
+ill
inside th€ noose
o.wh.t
has
aksdy slipp€d out ofit.
Vr'hat €nds up on
the canvas is not always what I originally wanted.
U.L
Doesyour own painting prcc€ss and ther€sults still
su
ryrise yo!
I
T.8.
Yesss. l'm €xcit€d when
Myp
l'm painting, ollen. lt surpises me in both
a positiv€ and a negative sense.
mary intercst in painting is the unpred ict.bility of the whole process.
U.L
Painting-an advcnturc...
T.8,
Y€s,
u.
ifyou like.lalso see
it.s
an adventure.
t.
Bacltoth€ beginnings. Yourcarer p.th did not
Leipzig.
lead
staightfiom machinist to Feelan<e painterin
what led you ro become. painterl
ta.
lkn€wf.om th€ beginningthat lwanted to become
an adist. I only staded rhe apprcnticeship bccause
con.ected to thet lcould getthe secondary school cedificat€ that lneedcd ro study art. So lsp€nt
wo* in. But it stillwasnt lost time - r etpeien.ed the last
ofthe CDR production process. Therc w€r. impressiv€ images, forexämple, how in thefoundry
the casting
hungfiom the ceilungwath chains and were formed manually by hand. Thet
'nolds
rcmind€d meofAdolf M€nzel's pictur€s.
thrce y€e,rs learning a trade I didn'twant to
gasps
cant rememberexactywhei thech ldhood wishto become ar ad sl turned ntöserious
determ natior; t was .erta nly a gradua process. But l've a ways been nvoved wth drawing, with
attempis to portray things around me, I built model ships and t nkered with them. th rk I wanted to
create another wond arouid me.
IJ. L.
As a buffer
zore between yo! and rea ity)
T, B.
Perhaps whal I was attempting to do
was ook at the world as lt
a ready er sted.
to relnterpret it lor
myseliand thus create my own world.
U. L.
Did your parents support these early artist c terderc es?
TA
My parents themselves are not artins, but theywere veryfamillarwith the Leipz g ad scene [,llfather
who ived n the
reighborhood H s apartment a ways struck me as a alchemisrs abomtory. For erefrp e, he had a big
wallcabinetwith anima s preserved in formaldahydeand then suddent .exttothem yöu sawa hu.
ma. idex finger That made a very b g mpressioi on me. And then the pictures a.d drawings that
fi led al ihe .ooms lo olerllowing .. I often look my own dmw igs to the book i lustrators Renate and
Eckbert tselfu h: jrn did this, could you ieke e look al lt) So over t he, the fee ing grew in me that
dEwingand paintngwas sonethingvery important. From the beginring ltook tveryseriously,
is a physrcrst, my mother a teacher I very fiequendy visited a painter and etcher
somet fles perhaps too ser ousl/ lt wasn't
untll
began to study art
li
the early r99o s that the do!bts
came, becaüse there was no resonance from my suroundings. Back then
Ean Cermary as we
I
modern. deep y odd
abolt t. As a pa,ite/ oie
pairting a.d pai.t ng from
wasn t he d in pärt cu ary h gh esteem aiyway. There wes soneth ng d!ny,
häd to fight
ägairn these preiud
u..
ces
U, L.
Ard how did you declde th
T.
s
lght to your advartage?
8.
Sometimes twaseasy:cerchyourjawu.diustkeepgoing tlled not to th nk ebout il so huch. Ol
cou.se there were a aße number ofgood colleagu-os, !riveßity f,iends, who also cont nued with
paint rg. 8ut we ako.egularl/ saw peop e demonstrat ve y leaving paint ng. I was always suspic ous
when people turned rEo'degrees
tom
drawing to v deo or computers.
U,L
whydoesn tthe computer, that is, d gta processlrgofimagesasamedunfo.fndrgand
exam n
rg
deas have the sane mportance for you that it does for othe' pa nteE ofyour generat on)
tB.
Cenera ly speak ng I
made an nated
pai.ting. wh€.
a
ways th
rk
doi t fnd t
uninterest ng. h s fun ro create plcrures on the compüter I tried t,
I
f
ms äid had iobs creatiig web pages fo' companies. Blt I can t lse it ior my
I srr
he tab e, a sheet ofdrewirg pape. r fiont olme and a penci
my hand,
a
i
why shou d I do th s on the computer) Why can t I
pict!re on the screen do ne) I didnt know why I shou
d take
jlst
skerch it?
whar good does the
th s deto!r
U. L.
A.d th s br r95 us to Eaumgärtel as graphic artist. Your wonderful sketchbooks are ike meta,
naratives You describe drawing as ar "outpost ofreflect on what funct oh do you assign it r the
ovecl co.text ofyour work?
t8.
t s very rare that a drawing is he plu as direct preparation for paint ng. As a gene€l rule,
a
good
sketch is bad for the creat on ola good picture. I ofter assume that I don t have aiy sketches My
drawings are menta monologues thet I ho d with myselfthrough the waystet on ofpaperi the/
represent a daiy processing a.d reworklng olimpressions.
ltel mysel5omethingorjotdowndetak
a.dthoüghtsasiradary,sothattheydor'tgetlostorsi.kintoaleveofcorsciousnessrhat
no
onger have ac.ess to when I pa nt. lt's a so a reläxing process Wher 'm dnw ng, th rgs come out
that had gotte. ntomyhead nadvertenty, ikebrdsfindingawayourofahalthattheyflewirtoby
vet a process ofsett ig down what you have seen and refected upor a5
im nary stag€ ofpa rtrng or does it represent independent ärtisr c express on?
ls drawing lor yoü exc us
pr€
a
T. B.
t can be seen as
p' nc
a
separale aid distinct partolmywork. Drawng s basedor a com pletel/
ifferert
or A4lormat. Also, the irear ratLre
ack ines on white paper and see them n ai A5
old.awngcarnotbeeastrethought r rerms ofpainting. donlpaint
'trans ating dcwings to a arye cänvas defliite y döes iöt wörk
p e. I have b
ra
d
i.earfäsh,oi. so
ln contrast to your much more spontaneous draw rg, a corstant re e€m nation ofwhat s on the
carvas predom nates when yoü pai.t. The urge to exeß cortrolcould repress the aston shmeniyoü
T.B.
There are various stages ofwork on a paint ng
month
oftwo.
-
n some cases, the entire process can take !p to a
obsetue the pict!re and then repeatedll put it away, because there is rhe danger ihar
wher you look at sonethiig every day, you stop realy seeiig t, you deve op a b
Thät doesn t happei
toyo!
iid tpot
...
when yo! draw...
tB.
No. And
that\
an
advantage. Workirg on
a paint ng, however, is often very much an up-and
process, I ke trek ng over mourtains and thro!gh va leys. l ve noticed that moments
about the picture make one physica lyvery äct ve are very
flips
o!t, b!t
mportant
ir
dowr
wh ch doubts
don't wantto saywhen one
when ore becomes bruta , hurts the pictüre ard then somehow liberates t from want rg.
when I palit, l'm often ir darger ofwaiting too much. The "nanato," who s ts at the back ofmy head
ard whispeß to me, rels me what lwant to do - he becomes my opponent ard ltry to ger id ofhim.
Ihese are d frcult psychologcal prccesses. ln the monert when lhäve erough and hurt the picture,
thatisakothemomentwhen lovercomethedowrhillside. lthappehsaboutthesamewaywth
large format pictures. lt seems as
iiore
has to do volence in
sohe form to what one loves. Oihetuise
it doesn t go beyond wanting aid thal becomes nmngey u.interesting.
u.
t.
It a most seems as
destroy
ifyo! deferd youßelfas a paiiter
ig /ourwolk.
ih an eiormously stressful situation by partia ly
And this destrucuor creaies the openness that eiables you to make a rew
beg hning ...
t8.
reshlmed, the portents change. And only ther can the process ofc,eat hg the
pairtingcontinue.Again and egain,lhaveihefeeingthat l'm startngfrom the begrnirg.There is no
pr ncip e or pattern thät I .an follow. There are no ru es or rhetorical set ofrules that help neither
Yes, the cards are
sti. nor painterll.
mysel
real
Everyth hg
nust
be reinverted.
lhave the impßssion thatyoudemard a
o
LlJ.e sloa.<. Fdv. /oL r'red
'lr( ard
But find that preferable to repeartrg
or d luting
loiofyou6el Manyothersfind salvaion in pictureseries or
itl
eJecred
18.
variat ons woLld ln fact be helpful But strangely enolgh, I can t do thai. ,\&hen l've developed a
pi.ture aid feel that it is lln shed, then n that momeit that is the orly possib lty for th s ptcrure.
wh€n tl tc repeat,t
le ow pa .te-s vrho ca.
But th€re s a rvho e
dö create a new p cture,
that
do
butnot at the same Ievelas the fißt one. envy my
at east, sometimes I do.
dige ofpossib
I
d trerent t nes olday wolid be ore .
ties ol rep tit on
-
Monet s variations ofplciures ofcathedßls at
.
lB,
N'latbe
l
reach t hat point somet
.o lect
ig
Vary ng m ght be som€th ng
me. considermyselfabegnnerwho scurenty
I earh at a d fereni nage...
n the process
of
U. L.
narative
But then perhaps differertly than N4onet. You are not interested n the subject as such, but in
.ontexrs. The.anal ve is the constituting element ofyour pa ntiig. Therefore, the
poirt
s not to delve
intothephysica.ha6cterist.sofes!biect,butrathertoevokemoods,andinthefnalanaysis
perhaps ev€. to cr€ate
repeated y appear
o.
a.
nterpretve wor d concept. Now you youßelfspeak ofp.ture elements that
the canvas a mosl !ncon5c ousyl for example train caß or baroque w gs and you
sät thet th€se e ements gain neaning through ,epit tion. Therefore, ä p,o.ess ofacq!iring meaning
thattales
p
a.ewthöutanyeffortonyou, part. Do you urde6tand yourpctures pimariy
as
T, B.
nrhebackgound atthebackolmymird-there
s always a
narat ve o.
a
pi.tor a mood.lcantjlst
create it w thour nco,poratlng real obiects. Anyth ng else would be abstract pairting e.d I feel very
unsureofmys€finthatarea
that br ng the atmosphere
50 lookforthingsthalaremoreorlessabetoexpresswhällwant,
n
ooking for into the picture. Ofcoursethere are sources that are
access b e to al : news newspapeß, daiy perceptions. They täke up residence n one's
head
a
who e
storage faciity in the brain. When one wants to create an atmosphere orconstruct a na(atve, one
goes nto lh s nental slorage fa.ilty aid look5 for somethi.g suitable That is I ke the room
r
a
theater where pröps are kept. where all ihe obiects lor a perto,marce are stored. ln a practical sense,
when I pa
nt
m the d rector who decides which props to use
ard how
U. L,
But a.cord ng to which pri.c ples) A picture is ä wäys also a formal compositior.
tB.
There arevarous seectio. criteria.
if.d
fra.ythings simpytoo pedestrian, tooworn out. throw
those out On the öthe, händ, I nnd urexpected objects. Fo. examp e, one oftei sees a beehive n my
pa
nt.gs. Or deep snowwthoutanyconnection to w rter sports or srow removal. Other
be oved
oblects are fe(es and sh ps lhat travelälongcahals.llke the dua meanngofthecanälasanariery
n
the picture and the ship as
metapho
ricalt
w thout
a
a
iransitory elehent, lt's possible to corstruct sofrething
n excess ive am ou nt
of myit fcation, thät
fL
nct on s on a level com pletely
independeit of dait perceptions.
u.
t.
Aid
targetirg the viewer's abilit to uhderttaid metaphors)
are you
tB.
ls mplytryloavoid p!re rcpresentataior wher whät
a so see around me
-
because that
see in a picture coiresponds exacdy
doesnl lrigger anything, not
n the viewer and
towhat
I
nol in me. There are
var ous ways. Sometimes it's enough wher oie lakes a very everyday scere and disgu ses it
li
coloß.
U. L.
... or
ihe "d yuption ofthe picture" th,ough abstract elehents,
I
conf!ses itse
I ke
these patches offog. The p ctu,e
so to speak At the same tlme, when you use these genuine pairterly structures you
ako br ng your medium nto plal. To me, this seems to indicate an eminentlyforma uideßtand ng...
ta.
Yes, this
fog
these are compo5itione aspe.ts that cän e so have an effect on the.ontent. Fog
interests me because it s unclear Thet is exa.tly whät I already mentioned
oftei fiid th s irdistin.tness nterest ng, because krowihat someth
but that can come.ioserto during the process ofpa ntlrg.
i.
relation to reilection.
ng ls there
that
I
can t recogrize
U. L.
Do you see
youßelfas pad ofa part cula.tradition ir paint
.unent New
F
ng
frcm Surealismus to Pop Art to the
grratior)
tB.
No, I don t see myselfas parl ofa movement or a trerd that cou d be träced back lo something. B!t of
course there are päi.ters thal i.terest me to a greäter or lesser extenti I don't or enl myselfoi them,
butthoughthem
regain and stre.gthen mybellefin pa
corld you iame
few hames as an aid?
a
itiig
lB.
Län yea,
. ve. ce \!asdeepyimpressedbyTntorettosbgmuralsirtheMadon.adelOrtoChurch
and the 5ä. Ro.co schoo. whal this man created out ofdeeP conviction and the for.ewith wh ch he
d
.i t defla.ds
the h ghest respect. Filling these movie{creen formatt ...
U. L.
a so a
mo!
e
atmosphe.e Baroque pa ntirg ofthe grand emotions ...
TB
..
F
aid ejleds Doil
ra I I d
ke ro
be afta d oleffectsl
kror fyou, skelches are "dore
real' than your paint ngs.
T, B.
My
d6w
ngs are
thar\rtha
sketch O.
probab
exist
\
olien nuch more distorted ard twisted thah the palntirgs. I always have the feel ng
arge-sca e pa
a
nti.g
I can
t make ary unrea clams. t!mucheasertodothatwithasmall
large scale n often appears too diluted and too sihple.when lPaint, ltry to make
pa,: olthe ca cuLat on. ltry to portray things that could actualt exlst even ifthey
. :h s coiste
ar
on with
my dmw rgs, on the other hand, arything is
Draw.g s p,obabva *ay öf,ecover ng from the compulsion ofprobab lty
possible
1n
wilrever
m free.
Paintng
U.L
Comp!,s ö. oiprobab
tt
n
palrting)
T.8.
der 'I nE n pa rti.g to be a great art. Puüing as de the fact that a Painting is a ways a "lle '
B!t whe. I n compos rg a sc€.e, it seems dargerous to drift offlnto comPlete arbilrariness As soon
as detach mise llrom gcv q. from the rigid torm, I ose the contelt. At the momeit, the ftamework,
I cons
I very mportanttome.Perhapsll move beyond that in
thal
a
so
depends
or
my
skill
t me Ofcö!ße.
- the better a ie is Presehted, the more convincing it is
8ut in the fna anä ys s my bas . point ofview s that feverything is Poss ble, like a Psychedelic dtug
wh ch alsö ho d3 ml thoughts together. is st
fa.tasy. leleryrhnscarbeconsderedprobable then- think, itcan no longer be takei seriously