Heinz Zander, self-portrait, oil on canvas, 1981
Photo: © 2012 Andreas Kämper
His desire to become “a painter and a writer at the same time” was based on early certainty. He began to realize this when Heinz Zander, who was born on October 2, 1939 in Wolfen, organized student productions with his stage designs before graduating from high school in Bitterfeld in his enthusiasm for theater, based on the desire to long for characters, to be in them disappear and speak out of them.
Zander’s talent became apparent during his studies in Leipzig at the University of Graphics and Book Arts at the end of the 1950s, when the teaching staff, looking over this student’s shoulder, was taught about drawing. As a master student of Fritz Cremer, he could rightly claim that he was not a student, but rather “a master who goes to school with an even greater master.” In 1965, the art historian Dieter Gleisberg staged Zander’s “magic game” in the first solo exhibition in the Lindenau Museum in Altenburg.
In 1981, Zander published his first novel “Silent Country Trips” with his own illustrations at the Hinstorff publishing house in Rostock. His pictures and later novels show how Zander’s literary and visual imagination are inseparably intertwined and often merged with ancient mythology, and even enlivened by music; he was friends with the composer Tilo Müller-Medek. And he had a tender affection for insects and other animals, as his early and last pictures show, also inspired by the entomologist Peter Thoms from Mühlhausen.
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“The literary is the most noble thing in art” is an aphorism by Heinz Zander, who means the literary within the visual arts themselves, by which the painter never understood the “crude depiction of a prescribed thought” but rather a pictorial poem as a creative finding of meaning. However, anyone who, limited by the idea of cleanliness, considers literary elements in the visual arts to be an impermissible mixture, stays away from such art, even though it goes back far into the Middle Ages.
Zander’s visual language, driven by his constantly renewing power of imagination, was that of a full, sensual presence with stretched, bent, turned, curved figures in exciting, even grotesquely staged events, which Helene Weigel and Ekkehard Schall also praised. Added to this were the bright colors that Zander was enthusiastic about. His pictures were visited by graces from the Early Renaissance, Mannerism and Symbolism and were smilingly embedded with the artist’s own grace.
In Leipzig, Zander was a fantastic realist who emphasized in 1976 that he was a convinced realist: “If you are not aware of your history, you will not find a real relationship with the present.” Zander dealt intensively with historical topics. The five-part painting cycle “The Great German Peasants’ War” for the secularized Kornmarktkirche in Mühlhausen in Thuringia, which was set up as a Peasants’ War museum, is located in the Panorama Museum Bad Frankenhausen, where the director Gerd Lindner has collected a large treasure of pike-perch.
Zander created the triptych “Tristan – Parzival – Gawan” for the Leipzig Gewandhaus. His creativity drew from medieval literature as well as from the literary material of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. He painted the historical artists Tilman Riemenschneider and Matthias Grünewald as well as the Brecht chanteuse and actress Sonja Kehler.
In one of the last drawings, “Argonauts’ Beach” from 1991, one sees dismembered, eaten, tangled-in-ropes searchers for the Golden Fleece and for a new path, which they did not find. They have failed just as the “scholars” did before, who lost their way through the stream far away from the shining peak, stalking and falling with sticks. Time has fallen upon them, paths have disappeared from memory and are forgotten. One might think so because the continents of our aspirations have moved, interests have moved on, surveyed mountains have been beheaded, hopes have disappeared in sinkholes.
Heinz Zander died on May 15th in Leipzig.
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