Frank Nitsche

Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Berlin, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, In Augenhöhe: Eberhard Havekost, Frank Nitsche, Thomas Scheibitz, 1999, illustrated in colour

Painting beyond the Wall: Havekost, Nitsche, Rauch, Scheibitz

The following five lots bring together a group of young painters hailing from the Dresden and Leipzig Academies whose critically acclaimed reaffirmation of the validity of oil painting as a communicative medium pertinent to our age is universally recognised by the art world as the harbinger of a return to the painted image. Artists synonymous with their time, Eberhard Havekost, Thomas Scheibitz, Frank Nitsche and Neo Rauch capture the zeitgeist of their age while nonetheless retaining the fundamental tenets of oil painting that have been taught in academic institutions for bygone centuries: whether figurative or abstract, each is expert in placing forms and balancing compositions to lead the dancing eye across the picture plane; each delights in the malleability and viscosity of the oils, controlling and cajoling their intrinsic plasticity to sculpt and differentiate form.

All four share the experience of growing up in the unstable environment of political and ideological separatism in divided Germany, followed by unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For Neo Rauch, the imagery harnessed to propagandistic ends by the failed political systems of the Eastern bloc directly translates into a lexicon plundered from official art, heroic Social Realist painting and the traditions of poster illustration and graphic design. In the present work the baron, industrialised landscape reminiscent of the cold, concrete impersonality of military zones is as much a marker of the death of Romanticism in the canon of traditional German oil painting as it is an image of his geographic and political position.

Similarly Havekost, Scheibitz and Nitsche, close friends who all trained together at the Dresden Academy, imbued with a rich but weighty heritage of canonical painting from Casper David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter, all consciously distance themselves from the echoes of Romanticism. What unites their work, beyond a bright tonality, luminescence of hue and a palpable adroitness in handling the stuff of paint, is a winking nod in the direction of the digital, virtual and electronically manipulated image, the world as conveyed through merchandising and advertising hoardings, repackaged, digitally re-mastered, pixilated and over-defined, the visual equivalents of genetic modification.

In Scheibitz’s large, brightly coloured paintings, such as Untitled (No. 304), there is a subtle discordance between the traditional painting techniques employed to depict unequivocally modern, semi-abstract compositions. His handling of paint simultaneously creates translucent and opaque colour planes, interlocking fields of colour that render a passage of sky as obdurate as a flat wall and a solid architectural form as diaphanous as a flower. With Scheibitz’s heavy, flat application and laconic, graphic-like reduction of form, fragmentary landscapes, architectural structures, overgrown flowers blooming in incongruous environments, all mesh together into unexpected and visually compelling abstract compositions.

Untitled DD 00 is a paradigmatic example of Havekost’s transferral of our disparate and speeding media-saturated visual environment onto canvas. Its formal logic deriving from the photographic snapshot or film still, the oblique viewpoint and closely cropped image in DD 00 renders the easily readable and recognisable shape an abstract form. Havekost’s matt colours washed with grey enshrine the mundane and banal atmosphere of our modern urban environment in an atmosphere that bears some resemblance to Dennis Hopper, without the narrative charge but with the same distancing coolness and ambivalence. In his hands a potentially empty or banal scene is alchemised into an overtly contemporary image of potent allure.

The influence of mediated sources and illusion of speed is most prominent in Nitsche’s linear, semi-evolved geometries that float freely in front of visceral monochrome backgrounds. Evocative of contemporary high design, these direct citations from architectural and automotive design are suggestive of mechanical forms caught in mid movement. In Lag 12 zones of pale, solid colour are traversed by black lines that energetically define the forms, barely erased lines of under-painting are left visible to document the history of the painting’s creation and to further heighten the impression of speed.

Despite the palpable stylistic differences of these four artists, they all stand united in persisting with the most traditional materials and media. In an age where painting has been pushed to the limit of what constitutes painting by the inclusion of myriad non-traditional materials, there is something refreshing and reinvigorating about the startling modernity of their image making achieved by the tried and tested combination of brush and oil. Their diverse and profound explorations on canvas and on paper aptly demonstrate the still inexhaustible possibilities of paint.