"My father, my godfather and my
best friend were called Ernst .... so much for accusing me of being unserious
... you can't be more serious!"
begotten in Gleiwitz .... Upper Silesia
pressed into life in dark times, in March 1942
in Wechmar ... Hammermühle / Thuringia.
He spent most of his youth as an ”inmate” in
the "workers' and peasants' paradise".
These years ... without comments, but,
Piärrunnie,
May the Lord be merciful!
Finally, Easter 1959, the family fled to the FRG.
Piärrunie
Thank the Lord for that!
drummed and whistled!! ..........
an ascension .... renaissance!
After this culture shock, school dropout, police school, foreign legion,bodyguard,crane operator, editorial messenger and necktie salesman.
Sabbatical years of wandering.
Stays in European cities,
Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna, Paris, Zamosc, London and Rome.
Time spent in museums ... discovery of painting ...
Rembrandt, Matisse, Cezanne, Monet, Klimt, van Gogh, Rops, Wiertz, Picasso .......
However ... turning to the performing arts, driven by the social change drive of the "Sixty-Eight Movement", believing in the power of theatre as a "moral institution".
Disillusionment after realising cause and effect ... and the clarifying verification ... only now, after forty years, does it fall like scales from his eyes, all this time he was dissatisfied, seeking solace in alcohol, because he was living in the wrong body ... the body of an actor? .... not that of a clown? Oh my God, maybe in Moissi's, Kainzen's, or Granach's? had he stepped on the forbidden grey cloud? was he Moissi's punishment? or Granach's reward? questions over questions ..... Moissi had talent, many had none.
So be it ... confusion of stage and manege ... boards and sawdust ......... where is the difference?
"The world is a big fool's stage ... forgive, forget, ...for I am old and childish". And if someone should ask him why he came into this life, he would answer with Emile Zola:
I came to live out loud.
The collections, Maria Kloid von Peckelsheim and Mechthild Grueter-Schellwald, from the „Gallery Maria Netzhammer“, are relocated and united in new spaces, as the "Lunatic-Art" collection in the new "Museum of lunatic Art" at Austrasse n° 9, which has been declared as an “House of Art“ and provides a home for the "Epifania group".
Away from the art market, against academic and social norms, the group was founded in 1980 by Thomas Toto Wenske, who soon spoke in a characteristic language and they developed their own style from it.
The eclectic citationism.
They see themselves as a loose, homogeneous, artistic community of interest, with a tendency towards the childlike, even grotesque imagination .... spontaneous artistic expressions with quickly executed brushstrokes on canvas, paper or walls.
Not copying, but the joy of play, the pleasurable pleasure of "abusing" motifs from european painting ... with the aim of expressing feelings and experienced sensations, demystifying the role of the professional artist and stimulating the art market with a “mouth-to-mouth breathing“.
The approach to the subject is a philosophical-phenomenological reflected process.
Partly with mediatative, calm radiance, partly restless and broken through. Prägnante contrasts are in a dialogue with luminous colors.
Complementary colours, such as blue-orange or purple-yellow, enhance each other and answer the question,
What is really effective? Is it the small things? Is it man, in view of his global interventions?
In the process of cognition, the images emerge in an art mediation, do not explain the man in the gold helmet or the black square. They open the consciousness for the contexts of art, dialogue between art experience and addressees. They knock on the ivory tower of art autonomy, because with them art becomes comprehensible, images are made to speak and they lead us to what we initially neither see nor understand, as Degas said: "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see". Or, to take Claude Lorraine's word for it, "the foreground of a picture is always repulsive, the true art lies in pushing the essence of a work into the distance, into the incomprehensible, where the lie seeks refuge, that dream painted away from the facts".
The images, archaic,scratched or wiped, surfaces, shining golden and glowing dark. Areas of colour emerge, flowing over the objects, the material and kneading a sculptural variable injected into the viewers with a flexible approach to truth.
Gianluca Malpenso
Permanent exhibition at the "Museum of Lunatic Art“, n° 9 Austrasse, 53179 Bonn