Klingmühl, Böttger’s birthplace, had to give way to open-cast mining. In the painting “Endlandschaft Klingmühl” (1990) it is captured in a certain way.
Photo: Elbe-Elster Museum Association
Eckhard Böttger always sought to open up the diversity of life – as a simultaneous tangle of shapes, colors, lines and gestural rhythms, through a wide range of articulation gestures and associations of ideas. An artificial structure, a creature of foreign origin, appears as something wonderful and unusual between the things we are familiar with, under our light, in our space. Conversely, by stimulating our imagination, ordinary things can create strange chains of images that contradict logic. Even while fully preserving their material reality, they can gain a completely unexpected wealth of relationships through exchange, connection or isolation.
On the occasion of his 70th birthday, this experimental artist, who was deeply connected to the Lusatian landscape with his earthy tones, is being remembered in his hometown of Finsterwalde – and many of his friends and collectors have contributed to this exhibition with their pictures, prints, sculptures and ceramics.
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After Böttger completed an apprenticeship as a porcelain painter in Meißen, he studied painting at the Dresden Art Academy from 1979 to 1984 and moved to Finsterwalde in 1985. He had to experience how his nearby birthplace of Klingmühl, where his father was still a miner, had to give way to lignite – and he created the peculiar color symbolism of his opencast mine and village pictures with ashes, earth mixed with glue, coal dust, and in large-format paintings with tinting pastes ( “Excavator noise”) or with stains inked on both sides on transparent tissue paper (“Landfinder”).
This fantastic realist was carried away by the play of shapes and colors in order to intervene in their course using sophisticated technology. He invented structures in the unformed, and the unformed itself established itself in certain structures. The human figure itself is subject to a structure and structures that “Ecki,” as his friends called him, constantly reinvented.
The figures had been lost from his opencast mining landscapes – and so he created “children of the moon, children of the sun, children of the earth – land seekers” (Böttger), who were looking for a new home. These self-creative figures and heads, overgrown with webs of lines, fantasy portraits, images from daydreams point to the fragility of human existence. Starting from the image projection of the unconscious, he has his own mythology of dissolving and reassembling human figurations. Psychological reality overflows external reality with unstoppable intensity.
The figurations and faces of the unconscious are not only fatal and tormenting, but also forward-looking. Delicate, tentative lines also include the dimension of the invisible, projections of the interior, geological layers. Can one speak here of a discovery of the unconscious of the landscape? It is the ambiguity of things that they experience when they are taken out of their usual context and allowed to resurface unexpectedly in other contexts. This creates landscapes, grotesque scenes and bizarre figurations with subtle irony. Faces are seen as landscapes, just as landscapes were previously inserted into faces.
If you look at Böttger’s works again and again, they seem to solidify, only to immediately dissipate again and put themselves together in a completely new way on different occasions and under different aspects. One can engage again and again with the works of this artist, who died of an incurable illness in 2010 at the age of 56. How could he ever be forgotten?
“At friends. Eckhard Böttger on his 70th birthday”, until August 4th, Finsterwalde Singers and Merchants Museum.