Painting. A contemporary art form

Do we still have to justify? Do will still have to argue that painting is an ongoing theme in artistic creation? Besides, it has only be a few that ever argued for its death "the public at large goes unnoticed" is as ever appreciating painting and sculpture as the foremost production of art. Drawing a line, applying color to a flat surface - an action that comes spontaneous to us, an activity we all were delighted to fulfill. Our first artworks are often drawings and paintings. Since it comes to us so naturally, I have continued since this early age, thinking it was the most natural thing to do.

The awareness grew that natural or not - it was not an all-inclusive habit in everybody's life. While studying Fine Arts in South of France, I received more insights on this fatal death of painting. But how can it not be contemporary if I - me, a contemporary of this society - is producing it? If I still have a strong desire to produce an artwork while applying color to a canvas? Nineteen century Romantic, is how my professors would describe my ambitions. Well, quite typical for a German after all, I learnt. So I struggled with my desire to paint, producing a Maitrise d'Arts Plastiques on a highly Romantic topic: La Création complexe ou à la poursuite du spirituel à l'aube du XXIieme sicle (The complexity of creation or in search of the Spiritual at the dawn of the 21st century.)

That was in 1994. The painting series Cascades is ongoing ever since. Yes, I do believe in the tradition of Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Rothko. Painting can still move us and "make visible". Since the aura of a painting gets highly diminished through the reproduction - agreeing with Benjamin, not with Malraux for once - it remains the hand produced original painting that can in an ideal situation fulfill its essential function - emanating the flux or energy of the creative process, be of transformative quality. But through my work I am not making a case for painting alone, since all forms of art, may it be performance, installation, video, photography, architectural structures, land art etc., have this inherent potentiality. The more medium of expression we have, the richer the artistic expression. Thinking about art, teaching, lecturing, writing about art can contribute to the necessary flux in art. I am keenly aware that I am entering battled grounds since artists and critics do often distrust each other. The reason? Power and control. Despite the fact that the artist is producing the artwork per se, the critic, curator, dealer or collector nevertheless has to choose the work and therefore transform the art production into a product of art. Due to this key position that the artist doesn’t hold, but rather the theoreticians, an animosity by the large amount of rejected/and or accepted artists got installed.

As an artist I entered the field of art history - to better understand it's functioning and to grasp the ultimate meaning of the judgment of art. I was often surprised how far apart these two disciplines are - how little creative urge there was but how highly is viewed the aesthetic experience. As a result, I started to work as a gallery lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I was able to encounter the public at large. As a lecturer I was able to play the mediator between the art work/world and the more or less curious audience of this world. As an art historian I would have fulfilled a position, as an artist I was producing an ephemeral - ever-lasting body of work: art communication as a form of art.

(Kunstvermittlung als Ausdruck von Kunst).
Mediating, bridging the worlds.
RMG 2002/2004)