On Tuesday, Anton Kirchmair left his property in the Bavarian Forest, which he does less and less, to make his way to Landshut. His current exhibition, which bears the striking title “Drawing by ear and other eases”, has been running there for a good week and a half. To say it straight away: It leaves a lasting impression on the viewer, precisely because Kirchmair, who was born in 1943, has reached a peak in his pursuit of perfection. The exhibition is constructed with admirable delicacy down to the smallest detail. But it is the war that also gives Kirchmair no peace. That’s why he got restless at home, he says he has to rearrange the exhibition again, you have to adapt it here and add something there. “But that’s also my way of working,” he says. It’s only when he has had the time to get involved in a room that things really get going for him. That’s why almost every Kirchmair exhibition looks different at the end than at the vernissage.
His heart’s theme is the fragility of the world, big and small, which the current atrocities of war are making even more obvious than it already is. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the Landshut exhibition. She literally nudges people in their obvious helplessness to become more sensitive to the many small miracles, but also to the absurdities of life that one hardly or rarely notices in everyday life. His art, as Kirchmair repeatedly emphasizes, is always in flux, his projects have no formal end, they never end.
Kirchmair has developed his very own view of the world
Anton Kirchmair looks back on an eventful life, many of his experiences are stored so deep in his brain that he can call them up at any time and process them artistically. In this way he developed his very own view of the world, which he then sharpened through long thought. Especially in the past 25 years, which he has now spent together with his wife Martha in his solitude in the municipality of Haidmühle. He is actually a born city person who likes to be carried along by the pulse of a city. Instead, however, he often spends nights roaming through the quiet border forests without a lamp or smartphone, a truly existential experience that for him often leads to memories of war-ravaged Munich, to the time when he walked his mother through the darkness of the city to the Freibank accompanied.
Kirchmair placed a piece of bread burned to charcoal unprotected on a tall, slender base. This fragility is an expression of his attitude towards life.
(Photo: New Gallery Landshut)
In the center of the upper floor of the Neue Galerie he has just placed a piece of bread that he found withered behind a freezer and then burned to charcoal. A highly fragile object, if it falls it is broken. And yet he placed it unprotected on the tall, slender base. “This bread shapes my attitude towards life,” says Kirchmair. “It reminds me of Spartan childhood, of the fervent midday prayer in thanks for the daily bread.”
He underlines his relationship to this piece of bread in a touching text: “whoever throws away a piece of bread again / my father said to me / his hand should rot off / I have / always stuck to it / – to be honest – / has there were a few / few exceptions / otherwise i / always stuck to it / not out of fear / but out of deep / understanding for the words / of my father / for him / of the two world wars / and the terrible hunger / of the global economic crisis and survived Has.”
The way he deals with even the most inconspicuous creations characterizes Kirchmair’s work more and more intensively. His development towards high sensitivity is reflected in the fascinating portrait of his pregnant wife as well as in the abstract drawings of nature and in the slide-through pictures lined up on a long platform. And even in that blackbird’s nest, tucked away in a corner, proclaiming how life is intertwined with art.
Minimalist, reduced, filigree: cage that proved to be surprisingly versatile in the exhibition.
(Photo: Sebastian Beck)
Kirchmair works with the lightest materials that exist, he even transforms grains of dust and soot into art. Otherwise he creates his installations with thin layers of wood, he uses charcoal and paper and he also likes to use toothpicks as connecting pieces. From the gallery, the view falls on a meadow between the gallery and the Isar, on which a heavy metal sculpture is enthroned. It is the smooth counter-program to Kirchmair’s fragile art, which not only radiates lightness but also clarity. The objects immediately invite you to accompany Kirchmair on his search for answers.
Kirchmair is a trained toolmaker, he sailed the seas as a seaman, which is why he likes to accompany his exhibitions with sea shanties. The father of four later became an art teacher and has been working as a freelance artist since 1992. The old house, to which he added a studio, is located on a nearly 1,000-meter-high clearing island on the border between Bavaria and Bohemia. In this seclusion, Kirchmair comes very close to the things in life. On his house bench, a adder sometimes joins him. Just a few days ago, he photographed two wolves as they ran right past his property. Certainly in this reserve he comes closer to the answers to the basic questions of existence than in the big city.
In his childhood, Munich was a city without noise and color
Kirchmair grew up in bombed-out Munich, in a dead city, as he says, without noise and color. Nevertheless, he likes to think back. “Because the city belonged entirely to us children.” At that time there were no vehicles apart from a few American trucks, and the children experienced a freedom on the street that is unimaginable today and the loss of which Kirchmair deeply regrets. The bondage and imprisonment of today’s children is also one of his core themes.
The connection to youth is no coincidence. For 20 years he taught as an art teacher at the Knabenrealschule in Landshut, at the Knabs, as it was called at the time. In 1981, in the gymnasium there, he realized one of his most beautiful projects, as he says himself, serial painting. He is madly pleased that he is now in Landshut and is experiencing the fertile soil on which his education has fallen. He never gave a reprimand, even if “the Hundskrippln” didn’t always do as he wanted. But now they show up in droves at his exhibition on the mill island and pay their respects to their old teacher with beaming joy and bright eyes.
Anton Kirchmair: Drawing by ear and other eases. Neue Galerie Landshut, Gothic Stadel on the Mühleninsel, until March 27, Fri.-Sun. 2-5 p.m., Thursday 6-8 p.m