Raimund Girke

RAIMUND GIRKE

1930 - 2002

"The first glance, by the way also that of memory, captures in Girke's pictures: silence and hazy brightness, an emptiness that feeds on the overabundance of smallest contrasts; an impenetrability that causes one to wait, which presumably only does justice to waiting. [...]
Raimund Girke's painting begins at a time when the first generation of German post-war art had already appeared. When he showed the first "white pictures" around 1960, these traces were revealed from an examination of the Informel. [...] The shapeless trace of colour acquires an anonymous formal value, forming outlines to which the artist also drew inspiration from quarries and exposed geological strata in the open countryside. Even then, however, it was not about composition in the picture field, but about the formation of a comprehensive network whose parts do not behave hierarchically towards one another. The picture does not live from a single center, but from the sequence of a juxtaposition of equal parts. [...] In the history of development, Girke thus joins the tradition of the abstract picture, whose founding ideas include the return to first elements, the self-reflection of both the artistic means and the artist, and the renunciation of pictorial references in favor of the explicative power of the picture. Girke counts Malevich, Mondrian, Ad Reinhardt, and Marc Rothko among his stimulants and fathers, from whom he certainly differs. [...]
Girkes pictures lure the viewer into a vivid process of experience, which undoubtedly consists of something other than the mere ascertainment of the factual in the picture. The occasionally stated silence of this painting is eloquent in a discreet way, it wants to be opened up. In any case, its vivid complexity aims at sensual experience, which is more and different than the reflection of the pictorial means stepping on the spot. Girkes paintings capture reality in terms of its effect, not as a definitively ascertainable quantity."

(quoted from Gottfried Boehm, 1986, in: „Im Grenzbereich. Der Maler Raimund Girke“, available at https://www.raimundgirke.com/deutsch-home/texte-über-raimund-girke/ and translated by Galerie Knoell)

Photo Credit: © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019.

Opening Hours Luftgässlein 4

Thu and Fri 13 – 18
Sat 11 – 16