Heiner Altmeppen

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Heiner Altmeppen (2nd from right) among colleagues (1999)

Heiner Altmeppen (born March 6, 1951 in Leer , East Friesland , grew up in Papenburg ) is a German painter and graphic artist . He is one of the best German photo realists .

Life

Altmeppen studied from 1971 to 1978 at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts . At the autumn exhibition of the Kunstverein Hannover in 1983 he was awarded the first audience award. In 1984 he won the second prize in the "German Landscape - Today" competition organized by Art magazine .

Altmeppen's works have been shown in numerous exhibitions since 1977. The exhibitions in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin in 1989, in the Landesmuseum Oldenburg in 1992, in the Paris Center Georges Pompidou in 1994, in the Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesmuseum in 1994 as well as several exhibitions in the Berlin Gropiusbau deserve special mention . 2005: Large overview exhibition in the Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche in Osnabrück. He is a member of the Free Academy of the Arts Hamburg .

Heiner Altmeppen lives and works in Bayerfeld-Steckweiler in Rhineland-Palatinate .

plant

The central impulse of his artistic work is the will to express a specific world experience based on a sensual sense: to depict a complex, metaphysical view of what is actually present, which exists in addition to the daily practiced, useful-oriented recognition of the real conditions - that Childlike perception of objects and places characterizes, which the adult usually, apart from selective illumination, gradually gets lost.

Connection to childhood experiences

His first works, the "Papenburg Landscapes" from 1974/75, seem as if he had observed the "Deichweg", the "Sand", the "Kaimauer" etc. exactly, but in a slightly melancholy mood, in order to return to the aesthetic force field of the Guessing things d. H. to perceive their presence as a fascination , as he had managed to do during childhood.

In 1975, immediately after the "Kiesgrube", the last picture of the "Papenburg Landscapes" for the time being, "Knut" was created, Altmeppen's first portrait . But this leap involves more than just a change of subject . Previously it was a long look back at the memory-laden terrain of his past, but now the motif appears as if the inner camera had been readjusted, within reach. In addition, equipped with that aura that gives it absolute presence. "Art is", Altmeppen quotes this sentence in 1998, "nothing more than the attempt to regain the intensity of the earliest experiences." The portrait "Knut" and other portraits indicate that he will succeed in this attempt.

Aesthetic perception

He definitely succeeds with the 1977 oil painting “Heiligengeistfeld”. You can see a section of the area used as an event and parking lot in the Hamburg district of St. Pauli and on this spacious area, under a star-studded sky, a collection of trucks in the light of tall mast lights: shown in a flat top view, isolated against the blue-black background , clearly exposed in their plasticity and - artificial light from above - glowing in mysterious colors. Altmeppen paints this picture, as he later reports, in memory of a happy moment of his childhood in his parents' garden, which is given a special, almost sacred atmosphere by the shady, dark wall in the background and the sunlight falling through the roof. "There trucks turn into Madonnas", it was said in a review on the occasion of the first exhibition in Göttingen (1977) and this sentence describes exactly what happens: Transport devices, representatives of a purpose-oriented perspective, are parked in a magical space and thus out of the pragmatic context transferred to the area of ​​aesthetic perception.

In the further course of his artistic development, Altmeppen, challenged by new subjects, also found other pictorial means (increased spatial effect, extreme sharpness of contours and information density ) in order to fix magical constellations of this kind. The motifs, landscapes above all, which he has in view above all else, change, but primarily and always it is this extraordinary, excessively intense light that tears things out of their profanity and provides them with luminosity, beyond their representationality points out, but remains completely secure in them.

"German Landscape", a major work

Among the paintings created so far, the "German Landscape" (location: Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt , Osnabrück) should be emphasized. A huge format (190 × 320 cm) and not only a monumental work in terms of its dimensions. Altmeppen worked on it for four years (1994/1998), “and there were” - according to the artist - “many days when I did not even cover the surface of a matchbox.” The beech tree bark was meticulously painted in the foreground and the foreground huge quarry behind it, which tears up the earth up to the burnt red deposits of the Mesozoic Era , over patches of land and forest, over castle ruins, village and church, over highways, commercial areas, industrial plants and the soon-to-be-cleared lava sand mountain in the middle, whose shape resembles the Breughelschen "tower building" von Babel ”, to the orange-colored banks of clouds that touch the hills far back, an hour's drive away, the painting provides the euphoric topography of a German landscape, its present and - including a number of idylls, possibly childhood memories - its history . It is a desolate panorama of civilization that breathes at the viewer , but at the same time it is the expansive, fantastic portrayal of a landscape experience : a portrait of a metaphysical reality. The motifs in this collage come from the Pellenz and Vordereifel region between Andernach and Mendig .

literature

  • Kunstverein Darmstadt: German contemporary erasers. Darmstadt 1982, p. 30f. ISBN 3761081219

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Altmeppen, Heiner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Empty