Hubertus Giebe

Hubertus Giebe's imagery explores the depths of our humanity, unmasking and questioning our society, like pictorial warnings or lamentations. But while his painting addresses our humanity, it never lapses into rhetoric alien to art, but speaks the pure language of painting, following only its own laws and constantly measuring itself against the greatest in its field.

For years, this young man has been creating drawings and paintings of elderly people, with such gentleness and harshness at the same time that the unresolved and irresolvable contradiction of life – to live and to pass away – makes one cry and smile at the same time. Giebe is imbued with this mystery of life. Practising his craft and ultimately forgetting his tools, he allows himself to be overwhelmed time and again, extracting pure substance from appearances, accumulating its light and transforming it back into another form of – inexhaustible – energy.

Hubertus Giebe is a homo politicus, certainly the most significant ‘political’ painter of his generation among German artists in East and West, if one can still say so, preoccupied with fascism and Stalinism and their consequences to this day. One of his major works, »Das Lager« (The Camp), says everything about everybody.

...in all these extractions of reality, a palpable counterpoint between movement and stillness dominates. At first glance, the shimmering interplay of dynamic forms and bright colours seems to flood the pictorial space, but on closer inspection, one notices a surprising stillness, refraction and an almost compulsive interconnection of the forms. The excesses of the individual forms and colours are contrasted by a fixed structure that remains in a peculiar state of immobility. Mask-like faces, internally agitated yet shockingly spellbound, bodies that break free from their anchors yet weigh heavily in space, or objects and signs that want to spread out across the surface but suddenly seem fixed in place, determine the pictorial structures of Hubertus Giebe. The contrast between diagonal traversal and rounded integration alone, which permeates Giebe's works like a supportive network, reveals the tension-filled creative conflict of his pictorial inventions, which contributes not least to their lasting, penetrating intensity.

In his »historical paintings« Hubertus Giebe vividly and sharply accentuates the relevance of history. He emphatically addresses historical themes and expresses them pictorially with strong personal involvement. It is not uncommon to see him himself painfully involved in the midst of the horrors he paints. In general, he always seeks and finds people in historical spaces, exposed and helpless, confined in oppressively cramped pictorial frames. The painter fearlessly looks into the depths of the human soul and reproduces what he sees there in metaphorical images that, despite making us shudder, seem familiar to us. It is not only the inventory of traditional literary and visual symbolism that seems familiar to us. It is the monsters and creatures of our own nightmares, our own fears and horrors that we encounter in his paintings.