This two-part oil painting is as big as a theater backdrop, 1.60 meters high and, when put together, 2.70 meters wide. Lots of space for the eye, which first has to find a familiar shape in these layers of ice blue, snow white and scratched moss green. At the lower edge of the picture, you think you can see a reflection of water, everything is a bit blurred, as if you were whizzing through the country with a rocket drive, and trees, rivers and clouds were mashed into a single colorful pulp. On the other hand, this picture also has something flat, almost static. Don’t the structures also remind you of a billboard, on which rain and bored teenagers worked together with their combined strength?
“Land-Scape” is the name of this diptych by Kiki Stickl, and it is probably the most bulky exhibit in the generally quite accessible show on contemporary positions in landscape painting. It is the fourth exhibition of its kind in the Neue Galerie. Every three years she repeatedly focuses on contemporary landscape painting; The tradition of the artist colony with its open-air painting predestines Dachau for this topic, whereby the particular attraction is the extreme discrepancy between the approaches: there the mumbling cow under atmospheric garlands of clouds, here views that often distance themselves from their subject beyond recognition.
In the diptych “Land-Scape” by Kiki Stickl everything is in motion.
(Photo: Toni Heigl)
The artist Kiki Stickl, who lives in Brighton and Munich, can be seen as an extreme example in this colorful palette. The landscape is not the subject of her painting itself, it is rather the idea of the landscape, a work with spaces, layers and movement in which colors and torn adhesive strips are responsible for the terraforming of the pictures. Here the boundaries of the genre are explored to the extreme. How much of the landscape has to be recognizable for it to be perceived as such?
Evolution has calibrated us to recognize patterns – the saber-toothed tiger in the bushes or just the harmless group of trees on a hilltop. We believe that we can recognize such things even in abstract images. In case of doubt, a single horizontal line is enough to create heaven and earth in front of the eye. However, that would be a little too simple and all too obvious for both the viewer and the artist.
The Hungarian artist Szilard Huszank, who lives near Augsburg, escapes this risk simply by relying more on the vertical. He paints landscape sections of forest areas. Only the tree bark, splattered with a lot of impasto paint, appears to be tangible. In the light background you can see shadowy silhouettes, it could be fir trees, the foreground is more like a Rorschach test; here everyone can see what they like to see. The colors convey moods and emotions, but no information about the painted object itself. Huszank’s forest is a pale, almost impressionistic-looking pastel thunderstorm. There is another variant of the forest motif, which comes along in screaming orange-red and yellow and cold-poured violet. Curator Jutta Mannes hung the painting on its own at the end of the room. “That doesn’t go well with other pictures,” she says, and in this case a certain safety distance for the viewer is not a disadvantage either. Otherwise the colors literally burn into the retina.
You can cool them down while looking at the work of Anja Niedring, a student of Rudi Tröger. Most of the year she lives in Brighton, which is where she finds her motifs: wind and waves and the imposing chalk cliffs of southern England, painted on small sheets of plywood. If you are lucky enough to run into her at the exhibition, she modestly explains that these small wooden panels are more practical than canvas, and that she likes the fact that the texture of the board shines through while painting. By the way, she is the only artist in this exhibition who paints her pictures in the open air.
Her landscape scenes are atmospheric compositions that are both colorful and always a little dirty. For her, the sea is a steamy soup of color, raw and poetic at the same time. Niedring is not so far from William Turner’s artistic expression, even if her style is naturally more modern and free than that of the great English romantic. “I work very intuitively,” she says of herself.
The painter Ludwig Arnold, who was also trained by Rudi Tröger, shows how less skillfully used means are required to create a three-dimensional impression of a landscape. He takes inspiration for his motifs on elongated landscape formats from landscape photos, which he, for example, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung finds. A few horizontal brushstrokes are enough for him to create a forest or a range of hills above which a white spot hovers as a neat cloud that looks as cheerful as if the happy painter Bob Ross had painted it himself. All of this seems incredibly intense and contemplative in its simplicity. The wide format gives the whole thing something panoramic.
The Munich artist Felix Rehfeld is at least as much concerned with the medium of painting itself in his work as it is with its subject, the landscape. He subjects some views of mountain views to massive alienation with the help of curved reflections. While some elements such as the clouds are still easy to identify, other parts are so distorted that they dissolve into abstract structures. Rehfeld transfers all of this one to one into painting.
The complementary to this can be found on a panel with 28 mountain images. Rehfeld presents them in postcard size including kitsch typical of the genre, when the evening sun breathes a pink shade on the snow. From a medium distance the images look like photographs – if it weren’t for the heavily brushed sky, in which Rehfeld likes to paw a few “mistakes”. So much imperfection is necessary to signal that neither a camera nor Photoshop were at work here.
Felix Rehfeld teases the viewer with miniatures of mountain views that only appear photorealistic at first glance.
(Photo: Toni Heigl)
Only when you step closer and look very closely do you realize that these mountains are, as it were, modeled from oil paint and not as detailed as you think you can see them. In a playful way, you are struck by the fact that the landscapes in our heads can be even more powerful than the images in front of our eyes. So this exhibition is not only a nice excursion into an interesting branch of contemporary art, but also a piece of playful self-awareness through one’s own perception.
New gallery: landscape painting. Contemporary positions IV. Opening times: Tuesday to Sunday, on public holidays 1 to 5 pm. Still available until March 27th.