Johannes Heisig

Dubbed one of the »young wild ones« of the East German art scene of the 1980s alongside Hubertus Giebe and Walter Libuda, Johannes Heisig became a master student of Gerhard Kettner at the Dresden University of Fine Arts in 1979. His colour palette was clearly influenced by the much-praised Dresden Peinture. Heisig's paintings unfold a sometimes beguiling colourism in which sensitively orchestrated timbres shine out from a tonal bed of light-filled grey.

Johannes Heisig is an artist who doubts and despairs; his works often evoke the darkness of night but they hold a potential for brightening. The artist is a »man of gray« who doesn't chase away self-doubt; he is the antipode of a consumer society dominated by the aesthetics of deoderized airfresh. (...) But again and again the gloominess becomes too much for the »man of gray«. At the basis of his art is a threefold »resolution«: darkness is preserved, overcome and elevated to rays of hope.

Johannes Heisig is a quiet, persistent observer, something that the high visual content of his painting necessitates. He does not approach a motif wiht an anchored intentionbut impertubably tides his time until it divulges itself as a worthy image. (...) That wich clears the threshold of his interest, often following lengthy and manifold viewing, makes a grade as a theme, as a challange. His small-format VARIATIONEN EINES BLUMENSTRAUßES (Variations of a Bouquet of Flowers), from 2015, ths distinctive procedural method of a modulation of colorful tonal possibilities offerd by a singular topic.