Achim Bertenburg | painting | "Deep light"

Grey, bronze, green, sometimes cerulean blue and purple or pink maybe, occasionally tinted red – the palette of Achim Bertenburg is toned-down, restrained and somewhat introvert. A monochromatic layout of colours melting away in mist, blurring and distancing, is followed by more contrastive brush strokes. As if words were just to set free from thoughts. The expression is far from being violent, though. It remains subtle and calculated. Despite the apparent chaos the compositions are complete as the artist elaborately plays with colours – it sparkles immediately or is flat and dim. The impression is accentuated by the mastery of the brush strokes. Their aggressive imprints either tear out from the surface or become blurred to the point where they almost cease to exist cramped in two-dimensions.

Bertenburg closes and opens his paintings at the same time. The interplay with the paint covers and uncovers, distracts and focuses to suddenly educe a face, silhouette or a landscape within his work. Following the innate quest for interpretation, ordering and giving meaning to the visible, the artist re-presents.

The works of Achim Bertenburg are sometimes given titles that only apparently indicate some interpretation, but are in fact a trace of an instant in which a thought or a feeling is captured, an expression of intangible realms, that should remain untouched. They are more of a brief lyric completing the painting, which eludes clear classification. The painting, which, for some renders an interpretation of reality in itself, for others leads to submerging, imagination or the ever lyrical. Everything is possible.

Iwona Bigos

Achim Bertenburg – a painter born in 1954, lives and works in Bremen, Germany.

 

 

Achim Bertenburg | painting | "Deep light"

VERNISSAGE: Friday, May 17 2013, 19:30

EXHIBITION: May 18 – June 23 2013

CURATOR: Iwona Bigos

VENUE: Gdansk Gunter Grass Gallery, Szeroka Street 34 – 37, Grobla I 1/2

OPENING HOURS: Tue - Wed 11-17, Thu – Sun 11-19

FREE ADMISSION

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