Hermann Naumann

I had a lot of themes - the Bible, Eastern Jewish poetry, Dauthendey, Kafka - these are very different spiritual spheres. The formal expression must reflect this. (...) Only when my creative power gives me the means to create something congenial can I answer this poets.

The formal treatment of his pictorial worlds corresponds to the barely restrained desire for variation in techniques and genres. There is a wide range between partly realistic-expressive, partly surreal, but often also abstract pictorial inventions. The reason for this polyphony, this openness of form, is to be found in his universal talent. For him, whose power of form manifests itself in all genres without constraint, whose virtuosity takes possession of every technique, self-submission to forced stylisation (...) is only an unnecessary reduction of his resources.

In his painting, Hermann Naumann cultivates a kind of expressive abstraction, oscillating between the poles of the purely abstract and the expressive. Both the realistic-figurative and the constructive paintings are characterised by tension-filled surface compositions and a vital and unused colour palette. – The watercolours reflect the expressionism of the Brücke, the colour worlds of a late Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and echoes of Emil Nolde's mystical colourism. Harsh colour tones stand side by side, outlined by night-black divisions. In the more abstract watercolours, Hermann Naumann then returned to his Blauer Reiter role models, provoking comparisons with August Macke, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky.

Hermann Naumann's international reputation is based on his outstanding performance as a graphic artist and illustrator. Here he has repeatedly achieved marvellous things, because his illustrations are never anecdotal, but poetic parallel creations that interpret the literary work individually.