My paintings

My paintings generally originate from visual circumstances only, without referring to any objects. Accordingly, I do not give them individual titles. Over the years and through my work, I have developed a system to categorise my paintings. There are five formal categories, each relating to the dominant compositional feature of a painting. It has proved reasonable to name my paintings according to these categories and to allocate them within my oeuvre in this way. Of course the beholder is free to discover several such categories in one painting ...

Corpus
The corpus is the spatial correspondence to the square. It looms out into the world, monolithic, forceful, it majestically claims its place – and I fell it, damage it and tear it, let it disintegrate, in order to build a new form out of its parts, a living, corporeal form, which fuses organically into its environment and is thus of the highest consistency. It is a reverberant form, its energy no longer consisting of rigidity and earnestness, but of elastic stability.

Form
The form is the free compositional element that has no, or only a loose, connection to the other four categories. It a basically abstract intention, and owes nothing, either in form or content, to an identifiable thought. To this extent it is the “wildest” category, also the most subversive, for the form rejects every law; I let it float in a kind of controlled lawlessness; solely the composition defines its shape and its locus in the picture.

Fragment
When the compositional elements dissolve to a certain extent, when they are left to themselves and swim on the picture surface without denying their origin, I call them fragments. They might be parts of a square, a corpus, a monolith. As parts, they each stand for the whole without being it themselves. In this way several of the strong, formal elements gather together on a picture and enter into a compositional relationship with each other.