The Prince House Gallery turns blue!
BLUE - is the color stimulus that is perceived when light with a spectral distribution in which wavelengths in the interval between 460 and 490 nm dominate falls on the eye. In his book "About Painting", Leonardo da Vinci described the nature and effect of blue as immaterial, not a color of the air, but a metaphysical mixture of sunlight with the "blackness of world darkness". Goethe, for whom there were only two pure colors, yellow and blue, similarly placed blue on the border to darkness and thus diametrically opposed to yellow, which stands on the border to light. The pantheistic view of his theory of colors thus combined the scientific with the aesthetic, mystical and psychological aspects.
The color BLUE is not just one of many colors from the artist's palette. Rather, it is a meaningful phenomenon that has accumulated a deep layer of meaning over the course of history. This is also reflected in the numerous idioms that indicate the disparate spectrum: "Experience one's blue miracle", "make blue", "the blue planet", "blue blood in the veins" or "go into the blue", just to name a few to give a small excerpt. In addition, numerous associations are lined up around the radiant colour. It awakens memories of beautiful weather, a calm sea, evokes the idea of sky, water and horizon, stands for youth and hope and also leaves on an abstract level the notion of a certain depth that lies in things. BLUE is no small thing, but something that reaches into the indefinite at the edges and promises more, even giving a color to infinity. This is how the goddess of heaven, Maria, also became blue early on Dressed in a robe to mark her special theological position as the mother of God.The romantics still recognized the hints of a divine sphere in the BLUE of the sky or water d modernism was tempted to strip color of its religious layers and explore its psychological aspects, from the Blue Rider to Yves Klein's Monochrome Bleu. However, BLUE also stands for clarity and concentration, so it is not surprising that many institutions such as banks, political parties or countries use the symbolic power for their purposes in order to radiate the greatest possible transparency.
The focus of the exhibition “Into the Blue” is on the blue works by Sabine Becker and the paintings by Annette Besgen. They are shown with individual positions by Nadine Ajsin, Sabine Arndt, Katerina Belkina, Thomas Geyer, Florian Richter, Karl Schwarzenberg, Gerhard Vormwald and Lars Zech to present different aspects of blue layers of meaning. With his photographs, Florian Richter gives us a pictorialist-oriented view of Icelandic coolness, which wraps the rough and dangerous in almost romantic lighting moods. They are deserted landscapes that are characterized by a painterly style. The vagueness and the vastness of the visual experience throw the viewer back on his small place in the overall structure of nature. On the other hand, there are the dark blue encased landscapes by Thomas Geyer. Like a lonely observer in the night, one looks through his pictures at sleeping villages from which an idiosyncratic warmth seems to emanate. The painter from Leipzig places the hidden view through the blue night at the center of his landscape travels. The structures and shapes drawn in food coloring by Nadine Ajsin have a very unique effect. “The Infinity Beauty of the Universe”, for example, describes a deep cosmic space whose blue background seems to give the deep reason for the hour of birth of a planetary system. Annette Besgen, on the other hand, looks for the beauty of the world of appearances in her paintings. The phenomena develop a life of their own in their light worlds. The blue horizon and the calm sea breathe the relaxed and warm mood of peaceful vacation days. The shadows on the walls, the paintings in the painting, all these ingredients are components of a visible world, which one actually perceives as separate dimensions, but in Annette Besgen's pictures merge into a nature of its own. Sabine Becker's blue works form the culmination of the blue exhibition. While Yves Klein wanted to dematerialize art more and more with his monochrome pictures, we find the opposite tendency with Sabine Becker. Like a structure, the blue pigments (cobalt and milori blue) are applied in layers until they have developed their own material structure that seems to resemble natural growth. These blue objects have a radiance that varies greatly depending on the daylight. But what happens to the BLUE in Sabine Becker's pictures if it's the only one from which new amorphous structures emerge? The pigment itself is no longer a means of representing something, such as a sky, a figure, or the like. Rather, the blue itself is raised here to become the subject of the picture and the hero of the picture.
Exhibition period
9 March – 6 April 2023
Artists
Sabine Becker
Katerina Belkina
Annette Besgen
Nadine Ajsin, Sabine Arndt
Thomas Geyer
Florian Richter
Karl Schwarzenberg
Gerhard Vormwald
Lars Zech
Venue
Prince House Gallery
H7, 1 (alte Sparkasse)
68159 Mannheim
Germany
