Exhibition

Max Uhlig

Grown up in front of Nature

01.07.2014 -
26.10.2014

Max Uhlig (born 1937 in Dresden, lives in Dresden) has been on the lookout since he began his artistic activity over 55 years ago. He wants to track down the unheard of the never-before-seen, capture it in the picture, extract it, peel it out. Quietly, with great concentration, he observes the people, the mountain formation, the individual tree, the cloud.

The trained draftsman turned against established painting early on through his studies of free graphics at the Dresden University of Fine Arts. With his unmistakable paintings and graphic works, Max Uhlig's work became one of the most prominent positions in German art of the second half of the 20th century.

“A thing becomes interesting for me when it becomes strange after looking at it for a long time.” Max Uhlig

Fascinated by the sculpture, it is the shape that impresses him. The energetic portraits, figurative street scenes and dynamic landscape images are dominated by the physical-spatial relationships: Figures and formations emerge from within, starting from the centre they conquer the pictorial space. The places where hundreds of watercolours, drawings and paintings were created are firmly anchored in the artist's memory. On the Dresden Elbe meadows, in Krukow near Penzlin in Mecklenburg, in Deutschneudorf in the Ore Mountains, in Provence in the south of France, Uhlig discovers the nature that allows him to find the balance between writing down crossed lines and the deeply felt pleasure in shaping.

Intensive perception of nature has been central to Max Uhlig's work from the start: “Grown in front of Nature”, partly created outdoors on huge canvases, the paintings condense into compositions of lines in all-negating black and luminous layers of paint. You think you can feel the force of the whipping brush, the ecstasy and explosion in the creative process. After his graphic work was presented in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in 2012, it is above all his extensive painterly and graphic work - in the form of large-format, glowing oil paintings and smaller, lighter watercolours as well as numerous ink drawings - that is the focus of the exhibition. For the first time, the attempt is being made to comprehensively work through the artist's entire work. In addition, the exhibition presents the first finished window elements for the south side of the Johanniskirche in Magdeburg and thus gives a first impression of Max Uhlig's most recent and largest work.

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Catalogue

Max Uhlig. Grown up in front of Nature
Edited by Annegret Laabs, 2013
Texts germ./engl.: Uwe Gellner, Annegret Laabs, Ilka Rambausek
164 p, 140 illustrations, Hardcover
Hirmer, München
ISBN: 978-3-7774-2280-0
34.90 Euro