Manfred Holtfrerich
Schöne Motive
März 2008 – Januar 2010

Manfred Holtfrerich, born in 1948, ironically calls his works “beautiful motifs”. Since the 1990s, the Hamburg artist has been collecting leaves in order to portray them in realistic watercolor techniques, thus escaping the transience and changes of time. With sharply defined lines, they stand out from the background of the picture and thus create the illusion of plasticity. However, this seemingly irrelevant, reproducing method is merely a pretext for analyzing his basic theme: the relationship between picture and sculpture and the influence of color on it. At the same time, he creates sculptural objects that, through the dialogue between background and figure, form, surface and color, become something new that is neither picture nor object. Surface and body correspond with one another, approach and move away. The three-dimensional object wants to be viewed as a picture, while the two-dimensional surface demands three-dimensional attention. This pictoriality of the objects on the one hand and the object-likeness of the pictures on the other point to the ambiguity of Manfred Holtfrerich’s work.