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Heinz Plank – Pictures and Drawings

Sales Exhibition in the Bilderhaus Krämerbrücke (Erfurt)

 Duration of Exhibition: March 3rd until May 21th Mai 2018

 

Bilderhaus Krämerbrücke cordially invites you to this sales exhibition with about 40 oeuvres, including paintings, drawings and printings. The opening will take place on Saturday, the 3rd of March, at 4 pm in Erfurt on the Krämerbrücke. Of course, your family and friends are also welcome with you.


Text: Susanne Hebecker, Erfurt
(published with kind approval, translation Andreas Plank)

From the beginning, the work of Heinz Plank is a bold, a radical, an excessive oeuvre. Equally intense in it are emotional intensity and visual power. At the same time, it is a subtle and fragile work in which lies the enigmatic gift of the passing over oneself.

Form and topic lead us into an imagery centered around the parable of existence and lament about the creation. Plank’s artistic reflection is based on a critical approach to the horizons of human experience.

His pictorial language reaches the power to shake out of inner necessity. Her secret is beauty. She appears in paintings of overwhelming opulence, in bright colors, unfamiliar compositions and strong contrasts. Discreet, repressed material looms from deep layers to the surface and releases the emotional furor that carries this work.

Parallel to painting, Plank’s creative work deals in his drawings with compositions based on synaesthetic perceptions. The introspective gaze allows one to immerse oneself in the beauty of graphic plaits, graphite lines of great power or yielding softness, as well as in the subtlety of colorful accents that Plank inscribes at the same time with conscious and unconscious creations. The fixed structure, which oscillates between abstracted and figurative elements, becomes an organic breathing and enables a poetic-symbolic dialogue.

Plank began his studies at the end of the 1960s at the Leipzig Art Academy, when she was still the focal point of cultural-political conflicts. From this period of hard confrontation between artistic freedom and the claim of the state to govern, circumstances arose that Werner Tübke aptly characterized as an “internalizing climate of peculiar observance, contemplative inward and outward”. Tübke and Wolfgang Mattheuer were the teachers of Plank. First and foremost, they forced the ability to look closely. Every artistic impulse had to assert itself before the intuitive form and the form before the claims of sensation. Sovereign, they accompanied the younger ones, who were necessarily removed from the experience of their predecessors and opened up new visual worlds. In this consequence, Heinz Plank broke away from the formative pathways of conveying.

 

He developed his artistic peculiarity in quiet seclusion. Far from Leipzig and away from media attention, he became a master of his art language and one of the most prominent representatives of the Leipzig School. Bearing in mind that his work has significantly expanded in its visual and intellectual richness over the past 25 years, the reception of these images in the context of German and European art history has become indispensable. The painter, now in his mature years, follows the independence of his creative work and demands the enduring of contradictions in his visual visions. Even in his late work, he brings artistic creation into a new form. In the process, topics dominate that structure human life as being unsettling and breaking: pain and disappointment, struggle and resignation, hope and failure. They coagulate in images of such a subjective as empathic world view.

Biography: 1945 born in Bad Elster—apprentice as a utility advertiser—1967–72 study at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig with Professors Wolfgang Mattheuer and Werner Tübke—then one year master student with Werner Tübke—1973–74 Teaching activities at the Technical School for Applied Art in Schneeberg—1974–75 Senior assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts Berlin-Weißensee—since 1976 freelance as a painter and graphic artist.

 


 Duration of Exhibition: March 3rd until May 21th Mai 2018

Location: BILDERHAUS KRÄMERBRÜCKE Klaus Hebecker, Krämerbrücke 30, 99084 Erfurt ( display map)

Opening Hours:

  • Monday and Friday 11–18 Uhr
  • Saturday 11–16 Uhr
  • Sunday 11–16 Uhr open only for viewing

Contact:   0361-5621225,  0361-7891645,   0177-3232044,  bilderhaus(at)arcor.de

 Download Invitation-Flyer of the Exhibition for Printing (German only)

Note to the Hebecker Gallery

Bilderhaus Krämerbrücke moved from Erfurt to Weimar in 2021. Contact details can be found in the Gallery section.