The master in his studio
Photo: Archive
He lives a quiet artistic life in Berlin-Friedrichshagen. Quiet means: Dieter Goltzsche reads a lot, sleeps according to a rhythm that is difficult to understand but unchangeable for outsiders, regularly (for fitness reasons) rides his bike through the district down to Müggelsee, breathing in the atmosphere of the Friedrichshagen poets’ circle around Wilhelm Bölsche (an eternal fountain of youth). , feels close to Johannes Bobrowski, who lived not far away. A place of poets, but the last bookstore on Bölschestrasse, he complains, has just given up. Of course, Goltzsche worked a lot because he felt incomplete without a brush and pen.
His artistic work cannot be understood without poetry. He communicates with her through painting and drawing, as it were. He once said that he wanted to cross the line between abstraction and perception again and again. An expedition, an adventure with an uncertain outcome, but always educational. Because this microcosm creator strives into the openness of the macrocosm, transforming the material that comes before his eyes into the content of a form. People like him used to be called mystics, because Goltzsche spiritualizes the purely sensual and understands the spiritual through the senses. This constant movement in opposite directions creates the tension in the images that always makes me look for something in his pictures.
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What is it that keeps Dieter Goltzsche so creative to this day? If he writes a letter or even just a postcard (he doesn’t send emails), it is always decorated with little sketches or humorous comments. If the letter is already closed, the envelope still offers space for final reports, which always have something to do with water levels and diving depths, so call for an imaginative translator.
Where does this impulse come from to simultaneously communicate and hide in the communication? It is probably that transcendence of creative desire that always leads him to express himself in a language that is not everyday language, but consists of lines, circles, triangles and empty white spaces. It’s only difficult at first glance, but then it becomes very easy. Because his picture composition has something of a magic spell. Suddenly everything that was previously separated comes together in a miraculous way.
Certainly, it remains a game with forms, but also a serious struggle to express the fundamental questions of life. The cycle of birth and death, the mystery of growth and decay: all of this allows the cheerfully tragic philosopher to persevere with a brush and pen – in front of a blank sheet of paper, a piece of cardboard, rarely a canvas.
The beginning never ends in an artist’s biography, because every new work is itself a beginning. To put it in the words of Wolfgang Leber, a Berlin artist colleague of Dieter Goltzsche: »I don’t currently know anyone who is more inventive. A Saxon fabulist has found his counterpart in the rather barren Berlin art landscape. How does a painter and graphic artist born in Dresden in 1934 become a main representative of the so-called Berlin School? By opposing the rather harsh milieu of Berlin for decades, and with the reserved, friendly persistence of someone who actually belongs in Florence on the Elbe.
The fact that Goltzsche began studying at the University of Fine Arts in Dresden in 1952 was fortunate. Bad luck, because these were bad times for the visual arts in the East. Above everything that deviated from pure naturalism hovered the sword of Damocles of the accusation of formalism, with which the Soviet aesthetics of Stalinist style (Zhdanov!) also attacked modernity in the GDR as “late bourgeois decadence”.
But he was lucky with his teachers: Hans Theo Richter and Max Schwimmer. Richter, in the words of Goltzsche, a “sculptor on paper,” a “talent of a household nature, disciplinarian of drawing.” Completely different was Max Schwimmer, who thought little of semi-educated people, an anti-academic antithesis, French-light, who enjoyed looking and translating what he saw into lines that seemed to float. A draftsman of atmospheres, as Goltzsche reminds us. How to draw the scent of a rose? Some tasks that you set yourself early on remain a challenge forever.
In 1958, Dieter Goltzsche became a master student at the German Academy of Arts under Max Schwimmer. The Saxon in Berlin – that was not an easy approach, in several respects. Because in Berlin, as a master student at the academy, Goltzsche is the focus of GDR cultural policy. At this time it was mainly represented by Alfred Kurella and was not favorable to him. You won’t find production scenes or best workers as subjects in Goltzsche’s work. Not because they didn’t interest him, but because he had a different idea of a work of art. If you look at Goltzsche’s early works from this perspective, you can see how someone developed their own signature by refusing to follow a political-ideological guideline.
He finds the courage to face the almost solitary sadness that imposes itself on him in the destroyed post-war Berlin. He begins to understand the urban in terms of natural history, for example in “Ostkreuz” from 1959. Where do the fallen leaves of the trees end and the steel of the bridge construction begin? In the same year he was released from the academy as a master student. He had rejected ideological dogmas in a way that was too stubborn. A difficult situation for the 25-year-old, because he also loses his residence permit for Berlin. However, he stayed there, even without official permission – in 1960 he moved into the former fisherman’s house at Kietz 29 in Berlin Köpenick. Now his maritime Berlin existence begins, so to speak – under the sign of his famous “Seagulls in the Wind”.
How is an artist biography formed? Above all, due to the duration of standstill that has to be endured, from which change only emerges gradually – but the sovereignty over such resolving moments does not lie with the pressing impatience of the creator, but with the secret knowledge of the truth that is inherent in every genuine expression. But this only becomes apparent when it is ready for it according to the internal clock.
Goltzsche’s picture compositions are never accidental. Sometimes, however, he only finds the balance between observation and abstraction at the moment of its creation. In this way, cities are naturalized, moved to the sea, so to speak, and transformed back into forests – and at the same time nature takes on something artificial, almost technical. Goltzsche increasingly uses new, colorful means of expression using watercolor, pastel or tempera. The color visibly rejuvenates the painter – and also creates new scope for the profound imagination.
The things that surround us are not what they seem. It always requires a second look, including the thought that guides it. The spiritual in art seems to have become rare today, but with Dieter Goltzsche it is always present. I don’t know any visual artist who is as well-read as him. His pictures of literature, which should not be called illustrations, are their own cosmos, their own topic. The printed word strongly shapes his view of the world.
In Goltzsche’s painter’s dialogue with poetry, the world becomes dangerously familiar. We now know her from close up, but she still remains something that brusquely refuses to be addressed in an all-too-familiar manner and insists on keeping a distance. And so his companions gather in spirit in a near and far way: Garcia Lorca, Sarah Kirsch, Helga M. Novak, Jean Paul, Kleist, Becher and Brecht. A painter’s book with verses by Heinz Czechowski stands before my eyes. In it I read: »We lived the wrong life./ Now it’s the turn of the others, the capable ones/ Are ahead of us. The earth is shaking./We are now living in the right place, poor in thought.«
In the dialectical gaps of fantasy, Goltzsche’s images grow that are more than mere comments: reflections of what is seen that have become symbols.
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