Raimund Girke
Malerei
25.01. – 08.03.2009

In its first exhibition of the year, the Kunstverein Bremerhaven is showing watercolors by the painter Reimund Girke. This is the seventh exhibition in Bremerhaven by the artist, who was born in Heinzendorf, Lower Saxony, in 1930. His first exhibition in the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven in 1972 marked a change in the Kunstverein’s profile, opening itself up to national and international contemporary art and introducing a contemporary orientation. Girke is also represented in the Kunstverein’s collection with several works.

Raimund Girke had been dealing with the art of informel since the late 1950s. From this discourse he developed his own visual language in 1957/58, which was to become decisive for all of his later work. Girke replaced subjective sensation with a structured and thus objectified pictorial space. In monochrome pictures, which were initially created exclusively in white and later in combination with a few colors, he placed the theme of painting at the center of his work: “The world of monochrome offers inexhaustible possibilities of a completely new character within narrowly defined limits. The color, limited to itself, is freed of all shackles, receives its own life and now reveals itself in full force…”, the artist said of his work in 1960. He designed the monochrome picture space through fine nuances of color with the sequence of small elements or zones. The serially multiplied brushstroke is usually the decisive creative means for an entire picture. Girke thus refers to the “artistic signature” without, however, making it psychologically interpretable and at the same time emphasizes the painterly element of his works. The effect of the painting should not be limited to the picture space through the gestural moment, “but lead the picture into a stage that allows unlimited spatial movement beyond the movement in the surface.” (Girke, 1963)
As a representative of “analytical painting”, Girke saw his works as the result of an autonomous painterly process that does not depict, but focuses on the process of creation.

With the exhibition of Raimund Girke’s works, the Kunstverein is paying tribute to an artist whose works have not been shown frequently since his death in 2002. The Kunstverein is thus continuing a series of exhibitions in which the works of Joseph Beuys, Tomas Schmit and Richard Oelze were most recently honored.

Julia Schleiss

Curated by Jürgen Wesseler.