Galerie Diede as guest
at Arte Casa on Mallorca
Gallery Diede as guest at ArtCasa on Mallorca
The renowned Galerie Diede is expanding its sphere of activity and will be represented as a guest gallery in our house from April 12th.
Gallery owner Marcus Diede will be presenting an exclusive selection of outstanding artists whose works reflect the diverse spectrum of contemporary art. Through this cooperation, we are expanding our offer for art lovers and collectors.
Come along and look forward to an inspiring exhibition that promotes creative exchange between the regions.
The artists
THOMAS BAUMGÄRTEL
Thomas Baumgärtel is considered a pioneer of street art in Germany and is also known as the “banana sprayer”. During his civilian service in a Catholic hospital in Rheinberg in 1983, a spontaneous idea sparked his artistic passion for the yellow tropical fruit: In a hospital room, he nailed the skin of a banana to the crucifix in place of the missing figure of Jesus. The controversial reactions to this idea became a key experience for him: he decided to become an artist. While studying fine art in Cologne, Thomas Baumgärtel went out at night to mark museums and galleries with a spray-painted banana stencil – as a positive recognition of what was inside these cultural venues. But also as an ironic commentary on the art world. Initially, this early form of street art met with resistance in Germany. Soon, however, the banana became a coveted award and is now represented in over 4,000 art locations around the world.
As a freelance artist, Thomas Baumgärtel has been constantly finding new, creative uses for the spray banana since the 1990s. His social and political interests play a decisive role, both in the studio and in his outdoor work, and many of Thomas Baumgärtel’s street art pieces have long been created with official permission and to great acclaim. He is also a permanent fixture on the art market. His extensive and varied work also includes landscapes and architectural depictions. Immortalized with spray paint on, among other things, detached layers of posters as a background, these classic themes are also characterized by the artistic origin of the street.
CArmen Benner
Carmen Benner has devoted herself primarily to oil painting since her early youth, focusing on the depiction of people and animals. Her pictorial language resembles solidified stagings, the meaning of which is conveyed but also allowed to remain mysterious; she takes up themes of current affairs that are urgent to her and processes them in various groups of works. Benner paints in a realistic style, predominantly oil on canvas, pastel on paper or wood.In her more recent works – oil paintings on wood with various materials such as real plants set in epoxy resin – she gives her works a special depth and structure.Carmen Benner regularly presents her works in exhibitions and art fairs. She lives and works in the Westerwald.
Moritz Götze
Moritz Götze is considered a pop art star, celebrated in East and West for the lightness of his colorful pictures, with which he, as a self-taught artist unencumbered by academic education, has enriched German painting since the 1990s. But if you take a closer look, the colorful imagery of his silkscreens, paintings and enamel works is irritating.Götze shocks the “brave new world” in which we live. In his pictures, isolated individuals float like weightless atoms through the universe of their unrelated relationships, each lost in themselves, in their own world.This corresponds exactly to our digitally reproduced time, in which the logarithms of the Internet create a tailor-made cosmos for everyone, a life bubble according to their wishes and interests.In the mirror of his art, our colorful, dynamic life appears like the nightmare of a frantic standstill. We are things in a conglomeration of things in a disenchanted world – which the painter simultaneously enchants again by capturing its fragile beauty. “Little happiness” – is it just an appearance in a world of global unhappiness? Goetze’s answers are as multifaceted as his work.
VOLKER KIEHN
Volker Kiehn’s work is rooted in a clearly defined artisanal basis. Where he uses stone or steel, this is hardly a coincidence, but a very deliberate continuation of this basis into a field where these craft routines call themselves into question. Depending on the approach, the neatly worked surface of a stone, for example, will appeal to a figurative reading or an examination of the material stone, to the interrelationship between the sculpture and its surroundings or to the invention of form coagulated in the work process.The same applies to the metal sculptures, which tend towards abstract, pure form without at first glance ignoring their figurative background.
Fundamental questions of sculpture are expressed here in material terms: how does the volume of the work relate to the surrounding space and to any known archetype? The surface is a second fundamentally important element in all of Volker Kiehn’s works. Here it glows rust-colored and thus brings the actual artistic work process and its question about the material and its relationship to the form into the center of the view.Assembled from sheet metal, carefully welded at the edges, the figure tells of the day’s work, which comes to form in a lengthy, technically and conceptually constantly testing process. The final finish – be it polished steel, highly polished stainless steel or bronze or a metal surface left to rust – is understood both as a user interface for perception and as an homage to the material developed in the work process.
TITUS LERNER
With his conceptual view of human existence, Titus Lerner is not only close to modernism (e.g. Expressionism), but also in harmony with the great eras of exploration and research such as the Renaissance and the Baroque, when the physical was explored and at the same time seen as the image of the creative and the creaturely.Titus Lerner casts his people into an indeterminate existence, which is characterized by the figures themselves in all their broadly interpreted existentiality. They are both present in being as well as pictorial figures that retain their timeless validity and embody it in the truest sense of the word.
PHILIPP LIEHR
Philipp Liehr first discovered his extraordinary dexterity as a dental technician. Today, Liehr is known for his contemporary wooden sculptures, which are particularly notable for his fine feeling for surface structures such as skin, fabric or hair. His art has won several prizes and has been presented at numerous exhibitions and trade fairs.
Philipp Liehr’s sculptures show supposedly unspectacular, anonymous people, some of whom are clothed and some of whom are depicted in the act of undressing. His repertoire also includes fictitious figures from the world of comics, hybrid creatures and animals. The everyday is always depicted more than the heroic. What really defines a person beyond social roles? By playing with different proportions, subtle or masked facial expressions and humorous accessories, the figures also reflect back on themselves to a certain extent.
ANJA NÜRNBERG
There are paintings that require not only space and light, but also people and movement in their surroundings. They need life around them, because only then do they unfold their full effect.Anja Nürnberg’s works are such paintings, because they come from life. The young painter from Halle is one of the breathtaking new protagonists of the art scene in recent years. Her works are color, light and exploding energy. Her works combine impetuous youthfulness in the use of materials with experienced technique and great craftsmanship. And there are few artists who have mastered the very large format as confidently as Anja Nürnberg.
Her paintings have several levels of perception, which only gradually reveal their secrets and gradually reveal themselves to us. On the first level, they captivate us with their seemingly unrestrained coloration and creative power. We experience the picture as a whole, as a coherent composition that stands on its own. The recurring color constellations always give her works a high recognition value despite their individual differences. On the next level, we discover the figurative. A chair here, a table there, a cup somewhere else and somewhere in the depths we gradually find more and more.on the third level of observation, the pictures begin to tell stories.stories of places, of moments, which then take on a life of their own in our minds and develop as if by themselves.
In this way, Anja Nürnberg allows us to participate directly in her impressions, experiences and observations, while at the same time giving us plenty of room for our own imagination through artistic abstraction. For Anja Nürnberg, living and working are naturally united under one roof. Painting is inextricably linked to her life, family and friends are just as much a part of her creative work as the landscapes she has traveled to and the places she has visited.Colorful impressions of the Baltic Sea, the Harz Mountains or France can therefore be found in the current exhibition, as well as the silent bond between a nursing mother and her child.Anja Nürnberg succeeds in discovering the beauty in the familiar, exposing it and capturing it opulently in her works. If we allow the complexity of this design to take effect on us in this way, the pictures, in their wholeness, always give us new and strong emotional moments of contemplation.
JAN M. PETERSEN
Object maker, lyricist, sculptor, the combination of graphics and captions is probably the most stylistically defining element in Petersen’s object art. Anything can happen here…But be careful: most things only become clear much later and appear in a more serious light than one might first think.The artist also works with Corten steel, a wonderful material that carries the essence of his lyrical work outwards into gardens and public spaces.Born in 1969, the artist lives and works in faraway East Brandenburgbourgh (not far from Moscow…).
DOROTHEA SCHÜLE
…For Schüle, a picture becomes manifest in light and color, in this order. Light, because both atmospheric and visual-physiological interaction demand a position and color can be defined as a reaction to the incidence of light. Interiors, landscapes and still lifes emerge from such an attitude in the knowledge of the richness of impressionistic visual experience. Dorothea Schüle also learned from the pointillists of the turn of the century before last to learn from the colorful set pieces of an isolated way of seeing, to form mosaic pieces into a functioning whole. …
For the painter, it is important to form a coherent, logical whole from the context of the colors and forms, without losing the recognizability. From such a perspective, her paintings are “traditional” in the best sense of the word, yet they are excitingly new because she strives less for a realistic snapshot than for a well thought-out composition. This approach of moving from the overall composition of the picture via the geometric relationships, the composition, the relationships of light and objects down to the individual elements runs through all her works.
In the paintings of the last few years we see a tendency towards ever greater luminosity of color. Thanks to a new painting technique using egg tempera and oil paint, her new pictures shine with great brightness, because the search for the color scale is resolved more directly. The light-flooded landscapes and interiors become transcendent in their lightness in a peculiar way. We examine the pictures using our own ways of seeing and notice how the trivial appears festive, unmistakable and worth capturing.
In her new pictures, Dorothea Schüle celebrates the reality of our being, she challenges the viewer, in the spirit of Schiller, to recognize beauty as a measure of our own aesthetics and thus ultimately our own morality. Could there be a more beautiful reason, a more beautiful occasion for a picture?
KOLJA SENTEUR
(…) Kolja Senteur likes to play with genres and combines the motifs of pop art with the most diverse techniques, which only become visible when viewing the originals. Elaborately produced and applied in layers, interwoven subjects develop on the canvas, their different and complex treatment standing in contrast to the supposedly banal motif. Found material is extracted, combined and isolated. Senteur’s pictures, which are based on film posters, comics and record covers, also function through the combination of the recognizable and the irritating. According to the artist, the high level of technical and manual effort, which leads to almost print-like pictorial elements, is intended to invite the viewer to linger.
TOBIAS STUTZ
Tobias Stutz’s paintings are primarily concerned with houses, interiors and furniture. Much of his work originates from the Bauhaus era. The spectrum ranges from painterly depictions of built everyday situations to icons of architectural history. The clear form and pastel colors often lend the pictures a Californian atmosphere.Stutz studied art in Nuremberg, Budapest and Alfter. He participates in exhibitions at home and abroad and is regularly represented at art fairs. His paintings can be found in numerous collections, according to art historian Aloisia Föllmer:
“It is the detail that makes many of his pictures so appealing: the details are arranged in such a way that lines and surfaces, as well as the horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, harmonize in concentrated, almost photographic precision to form a reduced whole. And it is always the borders of the pictures, i.e. the frames, that make up the composition and minimalism of the detail… Jochen Meister also speaks of “places of seeing” and of “pure looking”, to which Stutz invites us, and by omitting the figures, the clear construction comes to the fore. This creates an expression full of purity, as nothing disturbs the gaze. The viewer can come to rest. No narrative, no mood is imposed on him, he can remain completely alone”.
ROBIN ZÖFFZIG
Robin Zöffzig’s works depict an intensely colorful “candy flip-flop” world; provocatively erotic, highly ambivalent and bittersweet, the exhibition spreads out unusual and contradictory potential for meaning and is also a homage to the desire to look. With many allusions to sexist, politically correct and incorrect discourses, the works tell of beauty and youth mania, self-optimization and body enhancement.Zöffzig stylistically combines genres such as comics, manga and graffiti with humour, irony and grotesque features and creates the transition to the historical relevance of painting with quotations from the Baroque, classical modernism and pop culture.On the surface, it is a parade of the fun society. Posing and styling are played out to excess in the staged power and role plays. The supposedly meaningless aesthetics reflect cultivated boredom.
The show thus only appears to be an experimental arrangement of relevance beyond society. It condenses the synthetic and cyber worlds and illustrates the underestimated, rapidly expanding media substitute reality. Zöffzig does not authenticate this world in a contemporary, voyeuristic way as photography or video – but as painting, the age-old, slow, profound business of capturing and recognizing the world and telling about it. In terms of color, the dollhouse world is an artificial intoxication of shrill colors: bright, shiny pink, the American cipher for life in bloom, mauve – the color of gays and drag queens since the Mauve Decade of the 1890s, and purple; all screamingly shrill “squeaky tones” as Zöffzig calls them. The painter uses catchy symbols such as cat masks or a turtle and, not coincidentally, the image of the flamingo, a widespread species, active both day and night and a great master of swarming behavior, while the flamingo also stands as a dream motif for the longing for true love and self-love. An apt pink heraldic animal for the secondary world conjured up by Zöffzig, the partial anatomical stylization of the figures creates associations with toys and construction sets. The body parts ultimately become independent modules and in some works lead an abstract life of their own.
