Paintings by Rocke, Valentiner, Hahn and 20 art lab assistants in Tübingen
TÜBINGEN (pme). She moved from colour painting via black and white pictures to drawing as the exclusive medium of her artistic work at the moment. Dorothee Rocke's drawings exhibited in the "Joho" gallery sometimes press themselves to the edge of a sheet of paper or retreat into self-referential scribbling, scurrying from the unconscious. Both are symptoms one often encounters in drawings by children, who still live strongly in a world of their own, little touched by the conventions of perception and representation. As a rule, drawing teachers then try to drive this out of the children.
Dorothee Rocke, however, wants to get back to exactly that. And it is amazing: if you look at her drawings, you know exactly how heavy, how hard, how moved, in short: how textured everything depicted there is, even the mood is clear. Sometimes parts of the visible reality we all know can be discovered. Only what the whole represents is not known.
For some time now, the artist has been facing the drawing of a mentally ill person day after day in the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, allowing herself to be drawn into a whole cycle. Another cycle owes its synaesthetic realisation to a piece by Hohn Cage, an ensemble of lines like reeds in a winter landscape. Others are distantly reminiscent of abstract aerial paintings. Delicate dots placed next to the individual elements often create shadows and plasticity.
Info : Dorothee Rocke's works at joho can be seen on Wednesdays from 12-16 h, Thursdays and Fridays from 16-19 h and Saturdays from 11-15 h at Uhlandstraße 9. Until 15 February.
Christine Hahn and Peter Valentiner are a pair of artists who try to create similar effects with different means. A double exhibition in Sudhaus-Galerie (Peter Valentiner) and - a few stairs up - the Künstlerei shows the techniques. The effect of the paintings; a peculiar shimmering and oscillation, a flowing, moving surface, spatial optics that change hologram-like as you pass by, at least in Christine Hahn's works.
Valentiner's works play yet another game with the viewer: While one immediately steps in front of Hahn's works to study the unusual way in which they are made, which immediately catches the eye, one can take Valentiner's pictures for "simple" paintings for a long time until one discovers their ambiguity: Valentiner paints a picture from colour surfaces and then glues another layer, a painted cutting work over it, which covers the original picture in some places and exposes it in others.
His colleague Hahn also covers her pictures, but over the whole surface and transparently, with wax or similar materials, under which her short, thick brushstrokes, the basic elements of her painting, are broken in many ways and begin to dance. In Peter Valentiner's work, it is rather diamond-shaped or serpentine fields of colour that begin to turn if you let your gaze fall deep enough into them.
Info : The works of Christine Hahn and Peter Valentiner can be seen from Monday to Friday between 2 and 6.30 p.m., on Thursdays until 8 p.m. and on Saturdays from 12 to 4 p.m. in the Sudhaus Gallery and the artists' workshop there. And it will continue until 12 February.
It is not possible to go into the same detail here about the paintings currently on display in the Kulturhalle, as there are 28 paintings by 20 artists. The artists come from Carola Dewor's art laboratory, have worked on their respective projects over a long period of time, and one has to marvel at the level and range of styles presented here.
This has nothing to do with the usual results of an art course for amateurs. Each of the works shows an experimental arrangement that is as individual as it is precisely describable, an approach that shows the handwriting of course leader Dewor.
In this exhibition, art is not insignificantly shown from its exploratory, experimental side. For example, there are pictures that are processed and distorted on the computer. The resulting computer images are then repainted on canvas. Then, in an alcove, there is a kind of darkroom in which a picture, partly painted with phosphorescent colours, glows in a completely different way than it did before when revealed to the viewer in the light. Or three chromatic surfaces, so-called "Polaroid enlargements". Or is the title trying to throw us off the scent? But it is not always about new technology. The venerable still life, the table with fruit, is also present, twice, and sensibly hung next to each other for comparison. What happens when the opulence of the table, which is part of the subject, is contrasted by a reduced cipher sign language? Exciting questions, the exhibition is hereby warmly recommended to all.
Info : The exhibition is open from Tuesday to Friday between 3 and 6 pm, on Saturday from 11 am to 1 pm in the Kulturhalle am Nonnenmarkt. It will run until 23 February.
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