Sagenhaft! 40 Jahre Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie

11 tions are resolved on the higher level of art and the aesthetic. All this has got something baroque to it, something dream-like, is a kind of a parallel world as a commentary to reality. The art chosen, often characterized by opulent colors, matches the concept. Like, for instance, the paintings by Ruth Baumgarte, whose colorism is remarkable. There are almost monochrome works (camaieu, grisaille, and brunaille), but since the 1980s, with precursors in the 1960s, there are also false-color images in, say, mainly green hues. This development doesn‘t come by chance, as the color gestalt of her figures showed, already very early, hues independent of natural occurrences as depictions and were deployed to arrive at a con- sistent image and a melodious colorfulness. Ruth Baumgarte sees her motifs, like the head of a man, as autonomous events in color, corresponding to the whole of the image: Everything is painting. An important subject (and concern) of hers was Af- rica. She visited the continent often and regularly. She transformed her fascination with Africa into decisive Western art, not quasi-African art. Two as- pects of her African images were important for her: One time as an aesthetic event, the other time as a socio-political position. There is critical potential, as a catalyst for further reflecting processing by the viewer. Bernard Schultze worked in the same manner, al- beit in the abstract idiom. He developed, within the framework of the “Informel”, a very individual and fine lyrical abstraction rich in detail. From 1961 on- wards his painting extended into the third dimen- sion and he created his “Migofs”, colorful sculp- tures with bizarre forms. The basis for Schultze‘s abstract works is nature, especially the woods, with their roots, and under- growth, something that matches the legendary perfectly. Without ever coming near depiction, Schultze refers to the woods in a structural fashion. Lines and small stripes, spots and dots are closely intertwined. Sometimes we have a pure all-over pat- tern, covering the whole of the image almost like in the paintings of Serge Poliakoff, only with smaller elements. The paintings follow a pictorial strategy creating compactions, and Schultze‘s art reflects a painterly dialogue between an artist‘s influences and his creative spirit. Heinz Mack‘s strongly colored paintings are also in- stances of the legendary, of what remains usually unseen. Mack defines the aesthetic existence of his works through light and its refractions, through vibration and a specific rendering of immateriality. If we think of the “transcendental luminescence“ (Wolfgang Schöne) we see, like in the rainbow-color- ed halo of the resurrection in the Isenheim altar- piece by Grünewald, a symbolic representation of transcendence, not physical light. A like dimension, albeit realized in a completely different form, we en- counter in the works of Heinz Mack. Mack’s colorful images refer to the imaginative powers, to science and nature. They combine emo- tion, experience, and iconography in a perfect way. This is obvious in works like “Vibrierende Farbfelder” (Vibrant color fields, 1991). The emotional qualities, the painterly handling as a representation of vibra- tion, also visually triggering one, with composition as the stabilizing counter-weight, reflect relations of both rational and emotional nature, whose differ- ences are harmonized in the image. That‘s not illus- tration, that‘s association; the pictorial structure re- mains autonomous. A deep reflection on nature and human thinking: What we see and what we make of it is what makes us what we are. Gerhard Richter is yet another example for the ex- ploration of color. His new definition of abstraction is brought about by the creation of hitherto unseen color-spaces, which, always recognizable as paint, are differentiated into pictorial spaces, in front of which the viewer senses the insecurity of his posi- tion. He sticks to traces of the brush, which he fol- lows with the eyes, or he is taken in by the totality of the appearance of color. Every time something unseen, even something unpredictable happens, im- ages speaking of unattainable (and therefore “leg- endary”) dimensions, visual fairy tales without nar- ration, pure painting. Niki de Saint Phalle is different. Her figures look like they have fallen to earth from a legendary world. She saw that art is a principle of life, the principle of life for some, but tamed by culture. But she also knew that one was free to use this principle, also to avail oneself of the services of the powers of the hid- den and the secret. Rather early she employed this way of establishing a relation between the world inside herself and the outer world in order to find her identity (Pontus Hultén). Her figures (“Nanas”), mostly painted in contrasts of black and shiny colors, embody an ideal world of magic, character- ized by concepts akin to Huizinga‘s idea of the homo ludens. It‘s pure poetry, although always accompa- nied by a certain ostinato lugubre, an undertone of menace and danger, representing, like life, a dance on thin ice that can practically only be successful in the realm of the legendary. This show explicitly wants to be a feast, an arts fes- tival, with all the senses, and that is, in times where joyful expressions of life suffice to constitute the concept of an enemy, of very high importance: we all experience a vital self-assertion. Translated by Mason Ellis Murray

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