Bernd Wolf (painter)

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Bernd Wolf (* 1953 in Hofheim am Taunus , † 2010 in Berlin ) was a German painter. He was a representative of the non-representational painting of color in the tradition of abstract expressionism. He developed his unintentional painting under strictly conceptual conditions . In addition, analog black and white photography was an important, autonomous medium for him.

Life

Wolf studied painting and art theory from 1972 to 1978 at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main with Raimer Jochims . This was followed by a degree in philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Wolf's extensive travels in remote areas had a great influence on his thinking and feeling and on his artistic work. Some of his travel experiences, including a 1000 km long walk from Frankfurt to Cap-Ferret, which he undertook alone, shaped him strongly and resulted in his own projects. He also traveled to Iran and India. In view of the suffering, death and destruction he encountered on the way, his work stagnated and was fundamentally questioned by himself. The travels influenced his worldview and this gave rise to his need to incorporate existential experiences of being into his art.

Music had a formative influence on Wolf's life and work. In classical music, it is mainly Johann Sebastian Bach , early English polyphony and classical Indian music (studying the sitar with Daniel Bradley in Vienna for 10 years) that touched him; among his contemporaries, the music of Arvo Pärt was important to him.

Dealing with Japanese philosophy and art was a central theme in Wolf's life. Since the beginning of the 1980s he made regular trips to Japan and sometimes exhibited there. There he dealt with different Zen paths in painting and practiced the art of archery ( Kyudo ) and Aikido , in which he achieved high mastery levels. The search for overcoming duality and lack of intention in doing found profound input into his artistic work. He also made trips to China, Canada and Northern Europe - especially Norway - and organized artist trips to the USSR, Spain and Malta.

In 1980 Wolf's son was born. Until the early 1990s, the artist lived and worked in Frankfurt am Main, where he maintained his studio. In addition to painting and photography, he founded the Frankfurter Edition together with Reinhard Kohler. In joint symposia and in cooperation with other artists, she created unique artist books that were presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair and international exhibitions.

Wolf had lived and worked in Berlin since 1994, the move, as well as changes in private life, represented a significant turning point for him, which he took as an opportunity to modify his painting technique.

Due to a serious illness, Wolf ended his artistic work in 2009 and put his work in order. In 2010 he died in Berlin.

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Creative phases

Wolf's works were always non-representational and determined by metaphysical axioms. Overcoming duality played a central role. Duality, the opposition of all things and the abolition of the same in the balance of plus and minus, yin and yang etc. Questions such as: "Where is light in the dark, the inside in the outside, the warm in the cold?" Preoccupied the painter.

Another major concern was the realization of freedom of rule. For Wolf, this meant banning the artistic intention or the willful manipulation of the work of art from the production process. This idea already sounded in the early 20th century. in Dadaism . With Bernd Wolf, however, it is freed from the satirical elements that predominate in Dada.

The 1980s and early 1990s are characterized by almost constructivist-looking images that are created in layered painting. Large, irregular or regular color fields, often with a streaky basic structure, interlock or seem to overlap. Within this pictorial macrocosm, however, the interaction of colors has a life of its own. Often it is about color relationships, warm and cold, bright and matt as well as complementary contrasts. A catalog for the exhibition Poly- and Tricolores from 1989 documents this creative phase. At the end of 1989, a series of images was shown in an exhibition at the Hans Ostertag Gallery in Frankfurt in which a strange cross formation played the main role. Similar to the Lorraine double cross , three crosses are placed on top of each other. The background to this thematic emphasis is the confrontation with death, for which the triple cross became a symbol. Here, too, the large basic shapes serve as carriers of the color conflicts.

Bernd Wolf always worked for several years on large consecutive work phases in which he declined his topics encyclopedically.

An exhibition in the Frankfurt Art Cabinet in 1993 shows paintings from which symbolic forms such as spirals, zigzag lines or the like emerge as if from the carrier color, as if the painter, like an archaeologist, was pulling out long hidden things from the depths.

Painting on changing surfaces also always played a role, with both construction films and life-saving films serving as carrier materials. From this the artist in turn developed new processes, including a. a large monotype cycle in which the images alternately took on the role of giving and receiving.

When working on gold-colored life-saving foils, Wolf turned to the theme of the mandorla, which had primarily Christian connotations. From this he finally developed a series of reverse glass pictures, which, assembled as a large iconostasis , were shown in the 2001 exhibition In Search of the Picture in the Icon Museum Frankfurt am Main.

Bernd Wolf produced paints, canvases, painting grounds and painting tools such as brushes and spatulas himself and developed special recipes. His preferred color for the paintings was the relatively quick-drying casein tempera , the handling of which forced him to work quickly and without much reflection. In the course of his work it was more and more about pushing the conscious artistic decision into the background in favor of an unconscious, unintentional process in which the picture itself takes the direction of its creation.

Hand painting

From 1996 there was an artistic turning point in the painter's work. Bernd Wolf stopped modeling his colors with a brush or spatula. The hand, a tactile precision instrument with which we literally understand our world, became his exclusive painting tool. We can recognize each other by the appearance of our hands, in the lines of our palms it has been read since time immemorial which character, which physical disposition, and by means of his fingerprints a person can be unequivocally identified. Handprints on cave walls in Puente Viesgo on the north coast of Spain are among the earliest evidence of artistic creation. Wolf himself described his search for a new form of expression as a consequence of various profound changes in his life. An existential and traumatic encounter related to the then raging war in Yugoslavia provided the decisive impetus for the development of his new form of expression. Knowing that he had encountered a fundamental expression of human activity in it, he began to paint pictures with his hands.

All of these hand images consist of non-representational color phenomena that clump like clouds or diffuse like smoke. They were created by the artist constantly circling around the canvas and applying his colors with rubbing, circling and wiping movements. During the creation process, he couldn't really judge how his paintings looked, because he couldn't get any distance from them. His work was thus intuitive; the artist's critical, weighing and corrective gaze was deliberately blocked.

It was only shortly before completion that the canvas was placed upright so that the artist could distance himself and make a few quick modifications. But here, too, Bernd Wolf had imposed a significant restriction on his actions through the choice of material, because the casein tempera dries very quickly. The artist judged whether such a picture, controlled by subconscious processes, existed or was left to be overpainted - with a certain time lag.

Exhibitions

Publications

Exhibition catalogs

  • Poly and Tricolores. Bernd Wolf. Catalog for the exhibition from June 15 until 5.8.1989 with a fairy tale by Rafik Schami . Frankfurt art cabinet
  • Bernd Wolf. Painting. Catalog for the exhibition in the Hans Ostertag Gallery, Frankfurt / Main. 11/24/1989 - 01/20/1990
  • Bernd Wolf MCMXCII. From 4.3. until 31.3.1993 with a fairy tale by Rafik Schami. Frankfurt art cabinet.
  • Bernd Wolf. Exhibition of the OFB group. June 11, 1999.
  • Bernd Wolf. Looking for the picture. Catalog for the exhibition in the Icon Museum of the City of Frankfurt am Main. Foundation Dr. Schmidt-Voigt, 2001
  • Convertible altar. Bernd Wolf in the Grunewald Church. November 2006.
  • Bernd Wolf. Moonlight. Catalog for the exhibition Galerie König, Hanau, September – October 2008.
  • Bernd Wolf. meanwhile - as if by itself. Catalog for the exhibition. Exhibition hall Frankfurt, November 14–9, 2012 and Galerie König, Hanau, November 10, 2012– January 26, 2013.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marie-Luise Siebenkaes: Classical Indian Music, Teacher List Austria. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 17, 2017 ; Retrieved April 11, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tarang-klassische-indische-musik.de
personal data
SURNAME Wolf, Bernd
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Hofheim am Taunus
DATE OF DEATH 2010
Place of death Berlin