Juxtapoz Art and Culture-Spring_2019

86 SPRING 2019

I am very interested to know more about your
view of universal processes and their relation
to the collective unconscious. Could you
direct me to concepts that might deepen my
understanding of how paintings work to bring
re-enchantment to the world?
If one agrees that painting penetrates into spaces
in which concepts become blurred and words
lose their competence, then one accepts the
management of undercurrents that unfold their
own magnetism.

Julien Green, for example, described very clearly
how the perception of a ray of light falling on
an armchair became the starting point of an
entire novel. The creative person differs from
someone acting creatively, in that they become
the medium through which something wants to
speak to us.

As your work is celebrated more and more,

society will inevitably want to find a message

in your enigmatic paintings. What might you

hope can be gleaned through your life project as

a painter?

If it were possible to help a few people to suspect

that under the concrete of reality a life pulsates,

which forms branched mycelia and suddenly

comes to the surface in the form of a work of art,

then much would have been gained.

Art is unpredictable and eludes appropriation;

it is a phenomenon that amazes us and should

awaken a certain reverence for the possibilities of

the creative. It is a gift and a miracle, and thus, the

absolute opposite of what political commissars

and ideologues want to make of it.

Having spent your entire life based in Leipzig,

the largest city in the German state of Saxony,

I am particularly intrigued by your sense of

pride for this region and your engagement

with its rich history of intellectual and artistic

pursuits. In researching for this interview,

I learned that the composer Wagner and the

philosopher Nietzsche hail from Saxony.

Through one of your interviews I also

discovered Novalis, the great Romantic writer

was also from Saxony. What common point of

inspiration might foster like-minded creatives

from this region?

It should by no means go unnoticed that Max

Beckmann was born in Leipzig, and that J.S. Bach

worked in the city as Thomaskantor (the music

director of an internationally known boys’ choir

founded in Leipzig). The cultural humus on which

one could found their workshop here is so dense

Above: Schöpfer, Oil on canvas, 82.5” x 98.5”, 2002