Alfred Bast
Spannweite
18.02. – 08.04.2007

“SPANNWEITE” (SPAN) is the title of the exhibition at the Kunstverein Bremerhaven, which opens on February 18 with artist Alfred Bast, who lives in southern Germany. He was inspired to choose this title for his exhibition during a preparatory visit to the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven. In the German House of Emigrants and the balanced flight of seagulls in strong winds, he found an analogy to his open artistic attitude. Travel, risk, balance, breadth, vision, courage, and sometimes despair are part of an artist’s basic emotional makeup.

Alfred Bast, born in Schwäbisch Gmünd in 1948, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and, with a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation, in Pondicherry, South India, where he focused on free painting.
Cross-cultural influences dealing with the duality of human knowledge and perception opened up a new approach to nature as a “revealed secret” for him.
Stays in the USA, India, Hungary, Canada, and Georgia, as well as grants—including a scholarship at the Worpswede studio house—allowed a diverse yet focused visual language to mature. In 1995/96, he founded the KunstKloster art research initiative, which offers seminars and training courses on creativity and perception.

Alfred Bast’s works reveal an artistic concept that corresponds to the title of the exhibition in many ways.
He seeks and finds excellent materials for his highly sensitive artistic research into perception and design. These include burnt charred sticks, the oldest drawing instruments in history. He uses the concentrated energy of sunlight to engrave colored canvas using a powerful magnifying glass. The resulting ciphers are reminiscent of primitive symbols, city maps, or recordings of neural processes in the brain. To penetrate and visualize the essence of mushrooms and blackberries, the artist uses their own juices as color pigments. The properties of the media and materials are thus brought to bear in their independent qualities to create a special effect and subtle interrelationships between form and content. The material (Materia) is not merely understood as a carrier, but as an independent, inspiring quality that absorbs ideas, responds to them, and significantly influences the creative process. This corresponds to the interactions between the external and internal worlds, between the material and the spiritual.

The artist’s mindful perception is conveyed automatically when viewing the fruits depicted with such devotion. Contemplating the masterfully drawn and painted apples, blackberries, and quinces is an act of enjoyment. Such craftsmanship is a prerequisite for revealing the invisible in the visible, for illuminating associations in the minds and hearts of exhibition visitors.
Through the exhibition, the artist aims to create an “atmospheric architecture” to evoke a “state of inspiration.”

Curated by Anne Schmeckies.