Rainer Dissel

Rainer Dissel 2014

Rainer Dissel (born October 10, 1953 in Gelsenkirchen , Westphalia ) is a German painter , draftsman and object artist .

Life

Dissel grew up in Gelsenkirchen ( Westphalia ). From 1975 he studied at the State University of Fine Arts - Städelschule , Frankfurt am Main, where he graduated in 1980 in painting and graphics . Until 2014 Dissel was married to the German artist Annegret Emrich, with whom he has a daughter. He lives and works near Frankfurt am Main and Konstanz .

In 1981 the first solo exhibitions took place at Galerie Thieme in Darmstadt. Although his works were initially influenced by those of Louis Soutters , Antoni Tàpies , Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg , Dissel quickly found his own artistic path with a design of reduced figuration that was partly reminiscent of post-minimalism and a mostly black and gray color palette. In 1982 he took part in the exhibition “New Painting in Germany” in the National Gallery , Berlin.

The first material pictures were created in 1983. In these there is no clear relationship between the objects and the motifs. The massive, relief-like paintings have less to do with the concept of collage than with that of the palimpsest , whereby the traces of the different levels and individual backgrounds of the objects create a new reality. The old, the objects glued and mounted on the canvas, and the new, which the artist added, merge to a third level of meaning, which contains far more than the sum of the actually existing elements. The subject , the artist, is not only what is represented, but always the psychological resonance that echoes in these matters and motives. Also present are contradictory elements such as figure and abstraction, geometric and organic, text and graphic, which are placed in an atmospheric and tense relationship to one another.

Rainer Dissel, Nocturnal emission, 1982

Common to all work is the awareness and the feeling of human feelings. In a report for the cultural program Aspects, the artist says: “I want to communicate with the viewer exactly as my painting and the objects on the canvas do”.

1986 followed a longer stay in Berlin and shortly thereafter in 1987 the family moved to Boston (USA), where Dissel works from then on. Works emerge that have a depersonalized attitude and elimination of metaphor. In their place comes the independent structure, the serial arrangement and the repetition. The first artist books and objects are created, as well as experiments with the blueprint process . Dissel is represented at art fairs in New York (Art Expo) and Los Angeles (ICAF). From 1987 to 1990 the artist participated in the Darmstadt Secession by invitation . In the mid-1990s, when he returned to Germany, he began to loosen up the metaphor-free work emotionally through the more frequent use of high-contrast, bright colors. To the viewer, the images appear like color-based emotional spaces, in part they are reminiscent of the works of Mark Rothko or Günther Fruhtrunks , but always with a clear reference to their own artistic style.

From the 2000s onwards Dissel turned to the principle of collage again. The works, which are very much marked by signs of use, tie in with the early works and material images and, according to the artist himself, prove that the early works are up to date for him. According to the artist, both the older and the current works are based on the fundamental idea of Novalis that “everything visible is attached to the invisible”.

Exhibitions (selection)

Public collections

• Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA, Miami
• Schweinfurt Museum, Municipal Collections
• Berger Museum, Amorbach
• Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability, Darmstadt-Kranichstein
• Henkel Collection, Düsseldorf
• Rolf Dittmar Collection, Wiesbaden

Exhibitions

• 1981: Galerie Thieme, Darmstadt
• 1983: National Gallery , Berlin
• 1984: House of Art , Munich;
• 1984: Galerie Thieme, Darmstadt
• 1985: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
• 1985: Hartje Gallery, Boston (USA)
• 1986: Hartje Gallery, Boston (USA)
• 1987: Darmstadt Secession , Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt
• 1989: Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCAK, Krakow (POL)
• 1990: Hartje Gallery, Frankfurt / M.
• 1991: Museum Schweinfurt; Municipal gallery
• 1991: Galerie Silvia Menzel, Berlin
• 1992: Museum Berger, Amorbach
• 1996: IG-Metall, Mannheim
• 1999: IG-Metall, Frankfurt
• 2006: Galerie Cornelissen, Wiesbaden
• 2007: Rosteck art collection, Hochheim

literature

• Rainer Dissel, painting and collage with literary texts by Hans Thill, special edition, Verlag für Kunst und Philosophie, Frankfurt M. 2011/12
• Alzheimer's disease - pictures from a forgotten exhibition, Wunderhornverlag, Heidelberg, 1997 (ed. Together with A. Emrich)
• Pictures at an Exhibition - City Collection Schweinfurt, Schweinfurter Museumsschriften, Issue 34, 1991
• Catalog for the exhibition 01-02 1986 with texts by Inge Lorenz and Hans Thill, Hartje Gallery, Frankfurt a. M, 1986
• Cambridge - Rainer Dissel by Nany Stapen, Artforum International March 1987, p. 33

Movie

• Report on Rainer Dissel in: Aspects, January 5, 1990, ZDF.

Web links

• Homepage of the artist: www.rainer-dissel.de