Helmut Gutbrod
Helmut Gutbrod – Drawings and Monoprints
30. Sept. – 5 Nov., 2022
Opening Hours: Wed–Sat 4 – 6 p.m.
In the exhibition at ODALISQUE showroom, I am showing works on paper from two series that I continuously developed over the last few years: monotypes - printed from linocut plates and partly overlaid with drawing elements in ink and pencil - and drawings on sheets, which I previously worked on with acrylic paints, both flat and linear.
Paper is my preferred medium. I am interested in creating material textures on paper sheets, making visual spaces vibrate through transparent layers of colour and in enlivening static surfaces through moving lines. In addition to the painterly means, I use the basic elements of drawing: dots, lines, circles and out of these develop a reduced visual language of suggested natural forms, cell structures, wavy lines, shadow figurations and geometric fields.
I am intending to create a visual form of intensity on the surfaces and at the same time a fragile balance juxtaposing opposites: line to surface, static to movement, concentration to dissolution.
I like to let my images and image series grow step by step, I proceed in a dialogical way - an intermediate state is like a question that is looking for an answer. It is often precisely the ommitance of means of design that results in an intensification of the visual composition. My works are free from compelling contexts of meaning, do not require any interpretation, but stand autonomously for themselves and have a formal accuracy as well as intellectual openness.
As a counterpoint to my paper works, I am also showing three wooden objects in the exhibition - two drums and a figure - from Papua New Guinea, which originate from the traditional, cultural everyday life of the indigenous people. I have collected cult objects of this kind since my youth; they have broadened my perception, views and perspectives and were starting points for reflecting on the cult, identity and origins of art. I have always been fascinated by exploring the stories that are stored in these objects. With their formal presence and their traces of use, they are like fixed stars from another, unknown world of experience, which I can approach over and over. They let me feel distance as well as closeness, grounding as well as sensuality and imagination.
Helmut Gutbrod (*1958 Nuremberg) lives and works as a freelance artist and musician in Berlin. He studied musicology and theater studies in Erlangen and Berlin, has given concerts as a soloist and in various jazz formations as a pianist and composer since the 1980s and took part in film and theater projects.
As a visual artist, he exhibited in Europe and the USA, had various artist grants and residencies abroad, such as at the Frans Masereel Center, Belgium, at the Print Making Council of New Jersey, USA, at the Windler Foundation, Switzerland and in Lugnano in Teverina, Italy . He has been part of the studio community in the ‘Gerichtshöfe’ in Berlin since the 1990s and publishes graphic editions with various groups of artists every year. His works are represented in numerous public collections in Europe and the USA.
