Häusler Contemporary München proudly presents new works by Jürgen Partenheimer. The radically reduced hanging focusses for once on the medium of painting and shows how the artist explores its spectrum between line and plain, form and color. He creates fresh-looking images that contain subtle metaphors for the unutterable.
The works of Jürgen Partenheimer (*1947, Munich, lives in Munich) are characterized by poetic contradictions: as mysterious sign-like settings, they develop a captivating presence and at the same time appear so delicate that any literal definition seems to disturb the fragile equilibrium. Organic or architectural elements, landscapes, still lifes or geological stratifications seem to be suggested, but they always dissolve in a free play of abstract lines, forms and colors that one understands intuitively. Consistent with this constant state of transition represented by his works – between the concrete and the abstract, the articulate and the unutterable, the seen and the sensed – the artist calls his new exhibition at Häusler Contemporary München »Transformation«.
Usually, Jürgen Partenheimer’s exhibitions develop a dialogue between the different artistic genres that he works with – drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and also poetry. For the first time, the new presentation concentrates on the medium of painting in a radical hanging with works from the last two years: only one painting per wall marks the surface. On the one hand, this favors the viewer's immersion in the individual images, on the other hand, the exhibition appears – as always with Partenheimer – as a sensibly balanced overall installation.
It is eye-catching that the contrasting colors of purple and yellow or orange are repeated like a guideline within the pictures presented here – sometimes richly applied as background, sometimes glazed in a seemingly fleeting shape. Partenheimer further explores the spectrum of painting when he integrates drawing lines, mostly in pencil, into his paintings. In a text about Jürgen Partenheimer's painting, Bruno Glatt calls these lines a frame of reference »for the choreography of the appearance and action of colors«. The phrase aptly characterizes the formal elements of Partenheimer’s paintings as actors in a dynamic pictorial event shaped by the artist as a director.
Some of the works on display belong to the cycle »One Hundred Poets«, which Partenheimer has been developing since 2015. The starting point for this group of drawings and paintings is a selection of hundred poems by just as many international authors whom the artist particularly values. Inspired by the impulse of their language, pictorial replies and continuations to the poetic basis emerge on paper or on canvas from a subjective, inner process of »transformation«.
Partenheimer's exhibition at Häusler Contemporary once again demonstrates his ability to translate inner and sensed images as well as words between lines into visual metaphors. The result are timeless and at the same time very contemporary images that reach their vis-à-vis on a sensual, intellectual and emotional level.