Matthias Lahme
23 Jun - 19 Aug 2006
MATTHIAS LAHME
"Works on paper, pigmented ink, acrylic paint and water color, cut-outs, various sizes, untitled"
Matthias Lahme's pictures captivate the spectators from the first moment on because they invite them to view the works in a way that is beyond discursive reading, identification of contemporary references or the discovery of quotes from the realm of art history. They represent a form of painting that allows vision to find itself.
Regarding their creative operations the viewers here encounter a form of postmodernism taken seriously: Lahme full of relish takes elements from the canon of artistic methods of the modern age, however combining them with a critical attitude towards the world that has its roots in the German romantic period.
The style techniques used yet do not appear as self-sufficient gadgets. They are rather artistic necessities which can be explained by the artist's approach to elegantly deal with the means of a form of painting that has overcome the symbolic in order to create pictures in which the central questions of existence become visible in a sensually impressive way.
In economical gestures of encounters with social correlations and vegetable shapes of nature Lahme demonstratively shows the viewer how closely life and death, joy and sorrow, fear and hope are interlocked.
Take, for instance, two large-sized works, geometric apparitions of the night, in which the spiritual uncertainty, the human fear of spirituality, becomes beyond terms comprehensible in a hauntingly way. Or in the picture of a dancer, structured by cut-outs, in which Lahme makes appear the human species as an ideal, virtually looking at it from the outside.
In the ensemble of pictures taken from different groups of works and arranged by Matthias Lahme, the drama of existence is conceived as an immediate, aesthetic experience of peculiarly touching beauty.
© Matthias Lahme
Untitled, 2006
Acrylic, pigmented ink, watercolour on paper
139,5 x 104,5 cm/54,9 x 41,1 inches
"Works on paper, pigmented ink, acrylic paint and water color, cut-outs, various sizes, untitled"
Matthias Lahme's pictures captivate the spectators from the first moment on because they invite them to view the works in a way that is beyond discursive reading, identification of contemporary references or the discovery of quotes from the realm of art history. They represent a form of painting that allows vision to find itself.
Regarding their creative operations the viewers here encounter a form of postmodernism taken seriously: Lahme full of relish takes elements from the canon of artistic methods of the modern age, however combining them with a critical attitude towards the world that has its roots in the German romantic period.
The style techniques used yet do not appear as self-sufficient gadgets. They are rather artistic necessities which can be explained by the artist's approach to elegantly deal with the means of a form of painting that has overcome the symbolic in order to create pictures in which the central questions of existence become visible in a sensually impressive way.
In economical gestures of encounters with social correlations and vegetable shapes of nature Lahme demonstratively shows the viewer how closely life and death, joy and sorrow, fear and hope are interlocked.
Take, for instance, two large-sized works, geometric apparitions of the night, in which the spiritual uncertainty, the human fear of spirituality, becomes beyond terms comprehensible in a hauntingly way. Or in the picture of a dancer, structured by cut-outs, in which Lahme makes appear the human species as an ideal, virtually looking at it from the outside.
In the ensemble of pictures taken from different groups of works and arranged by Matthias Lahme, the drama of existence is conceived as an immediate, aesthetic experience of peculiarly touching beauty.
© Matthias Lahme
Untitled, 2006
Acrylic, pigmented ink, watercolour on paper
139,5 x 104,5 cm/54,9 x 41,1 inches