Exhibition “Between the Pictures” in Erfurt: At the end of painting

“Between the images” – what does that mean? On the one hand, this exhibition title could refer to what is added or lost when you transform a photograph into a painting or a play into a film. The words can also be related to Klaus Armbruster’s artistic biography. This is roughly divided into three creative phases: First came painting, then came film and television projects, and finally the now 81-year-old returned to painting.

When you enter his exhibition on the second floor of the Erfurt Angermuseum, you are initially confronted with a large number of early works. They are large-format paintings; The canvas is filled to the brim with pipes, rails and stairs that are wildly linked and merge into one another. These structures, often in dirty green and fleshy tones, appear to the viewer as if she could fall into this spatial depth or as if they were bulging threateningly above her. They are not perfectly worked out; In many places, rough brush strokes with several traces of color blur the constructions, expressively overlay the figurative, creating the impression of spontaneity. If you look closely, you can also see human shapes here. As Armbruster writes, they are “uncontrolled, associative inner images” that found their way onto the screen and “over time related more and more specifically to the themes of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War.”

What is certainly special about this exhibition is that the artist wrote almost all of the accompanying texts himself. In this way, his artistic development can also be directly traced as an internal process. Four paintings hang on a wall, marking the end of the first creative phase. They are brightly colored psychedelic imagery with sharp contours, some motifs are repeated through reflection in the center of the picture. However, colorfulness and symmetry do not mean harmony and joy here. Headless female bodies give birth, their shapes – muscles, bones, fat – exaggerated to the point of ugliness. In another picture there are pale gray bodies on colorful circles – are they turntables? – to see, they seem lifeless. It’s called “Fourth World (At the End of Painting)”, painted in 1969/70. So did Armbruster already know back then that these would be his last pictures for the time being? He writes: »With the move to Hamburg, the political challenges of the ’68 movement inevitably penetrated the theme of my artistic work. At first I tried to respond to this with surrealistically encoded works, but my paintings increasingly froze under the brutality of their themes. After my participation in the large exhibition ENGAGED ART at the Kunsthaus Hamburg, I gave up painting and turned to the medium of film… «

Klaus Armbruster, born in Tübingen in 1942, studied painting in Stuttgart until 1967. From 1972 to 1980 he worked as an author, director and editor for NDR. From 1980 onwards, as can be read in the accompanying booklet, he developed a multimedia work with a focus on film and video that crossed borders with stage art. In 1983 he became professor of film and audiovisual media in Essen. His film work is diverse – the exhibition only shows a half-hour compilation of it, created by the artist himself. There are fragments from five very different works, including a portrait of Armbruster’s mother, the video version of “The Iliad of Homer”, staged by Hansgünther Heyme in the Schauspielhaus Essen in 1989/90, and »Pöhler’s Passages« (2002), a film that uses documentary and fictional means to stage the itinerant photographer Friedrich Pöhler’s stay in a pietistic village at the beginning of the 20th century.

Armbruster writes about his third creative phase, the products of which are in the back of the exhibition hall: »After my retirement (…) I returned to painting. I tried to use experiences from my work with the montage of moving images in the time-based arts of film and music, which I had done as part of my media and stage projects. I wanted to reflect once again as a painter on the most important works of this period of my life and at the same time transfer them from their immaterial and fleeting existence into an unlimited permanence of real paintings.” You can see immediately that a break has taken place: the expressive has disappeared, these pictures are more conceptual and realistic in style than the early paintings. A picture montage, for example, consists of various painted motifs from “Pöhler’s Passages”. The color scheme plays with the film’s time layers: old black-and-white photographs that appear in it are made more present through colors and stand on an equal footing next to (re)painted still images from the fictional production. The image montages “Desk Life” (2018/2019) are also impressive in terms of the interaction of different media. The format of the screens, wide and low, is similar to that of a film roll. You can see Armbruster’s desk with various objects: photographs, a small bust, dried roses, books and magazines. The gaze wanders over these things like a camera, gradually bringing them into consciousness.

Is this interconnection of different media just an aesthetic gimmick? Above all, this initially opens up thinking spaces: What properties do the individual media have? What access to reality can they give us? And what gap is opening up between them? Where are momentary and where permanent qualities evident? From here, thoughts can also be sparked on questions outside of art. One thing is undeniable: painting, which has often been declared dead, shows itself here, in Klaus Armbruster’s work, once again as a medium whose loss would be difficult for art to cope with.

“Klaus Armbruster: Between the Pictures”, until October 27th, Angermuseum Erfurt. Many of Armbruster’s video and film works are available free of charge on the Internet: www.armbruster-klaus.de