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.