Introduction
Mica schist, dark waters, lush blossoms, nocturnal figures. Blind eyes, facades and windows, an infant with a blue tit under a protective cloak. In his latest pictorial creations, contemporary painter and graphic artist Lutz Bleidorn once again refrains from creating closed illusions. His multi-layered visual worlds are full of breaks and shifts because they combine reality with fiction and imagination, the past with the present, personal experiences with dreams.
Born in Rendsburg in Schleswig-Holstein in 1973, Lutz Bleidorn completed his master's degree with Elke Hopfe at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. He has been based in Rendsburg again since 2019. His exhibition »Katzensilber Wasserschwarz« (Cat Silver Water Black) is the artist's fourth solo show at Galerie Himmel. It brings together more than 20 new paintings from the period 2024 to 2026, as well as a selection of his collages and graphite drawings.
Slides, photographs, and sketching in nature form the basis of Bleidorn's creative process, in which he captures individual flowers and trees or larger sections of landscape. Based on these sketched impressions of nature, remembered images, formative experiences, and dream sequences of certain places or figures, complex pictorial structures then emerge in the studio on paper or canvas, in which the artist addresses his own family history, his identity and perception, as well as the relationship between humans and nature.
Bleidorn's compositions are either designed as fluid hidden object pictures, as in the beach scene »Saint 81« and in the advent calendar-like depiction »Die Stadt im Dezember« (The City in December). Or he constructs the pictorial spaces as additive structures of color fields, fragmentary objects and figures or their fragments, as in the Greifswald reflection »Die Stadt G« (The City G), »Abendspaziergang« (Evening Walk) or, even more playfully, in the collages »The Mountain«, »Wanderer« in der »Stadt der Ahnen« (Wanderer in the City of Ancestors) and »In den Hüttener Bergen« (In the Hütten Mountains).
In Lutz Bleidorn's art, representationalism and abstraction fundamentally coexist on an equal footing and are also used within a single image to mutually enhance their effect, similar to a pendulum swing between concreteness and openness. Consider, for example, the architectural fragments surrounded by abstract fields of color in »Die Stadt G« (The City G) or the depiction of a rising seagull in the large-format work »Saint 81«, where the bird's left wing seems to dissolve into clouds. The image as a credible illusion of figurativeness and perspective tilts, inviting viewers to reflect on reality and the status of images. The alternation between impasto painterly textures and glazed color transitions, between almost relief-like, cracked application and smooth surfaces, between color gradients and cut edges makes viewing Lutz Bleidorn's works all the more a particularly vivid visual experience full of breaks.
Teresa Ende
