My personal peer group

Painting 1987/2023

Eröffnung:
27. Januar 2023, 19 Uhr

Dauer der Ausstellung:
28. Januar – 10. März 2023

Galerie Heike Strelow
Strelow & Walter Projects
Lange Str. 31
60311 Frankfurt am Main

Herbert Warmuth about the exhibition
"I was always a driven man. As soon as certain group of works been done, the research on them not even completed, than I had ideas of other works that I absolutely had to of other works that I absolutely had to try out, to find out what they could mean for me, whether they would convince me, take me further.
 
In the process, I was always driven by two questions:
 
What is painting and, above all, an adequate painting for the time,
in which I find myself?

and

What does a painting look like in which I recognize myself as a painter and yet leave the viewer the freedom to arrive at his own ideas and his own view and reading with his own story?
 
My paintings should touch and establish relationships with the viewer, but always leave him room for his preferences, his feelings and his interpretation. They should offer him the possibility to read them intellectually in the context of other works, but at the same time, despite all the transparency of the production, the way they are made, they should also go beyond the purely conceptual and intellectually understandable in order to surprise - myself included.   
 
Looking at my work today, it seems to me as if I had circled my possibilities once, as if everything was ready, nothing was finished, and so I feel free to continue any work that is on view in the exhibition, if necessary, to enter into the investigation again, but under today's guidelines and with different experiences.

The exhibition is therefore not meant to be a retrospective. It is rather a personal look at what is essential for me. Just as my paintings are ultimately the results of two questions, the exhibition is an attempt to bring together an idea of my interests and investigations of painting over the last 35 years into one view - for the viewer of the exhibition, but also for me as a painter, who can now look at the individual results together and reflect on quintessence of years of work.

And all at once the pictorial results of being driven seem to me nevertheless all very related, not to say the same. In the end, all my works, despite all their differences, have always been about the same thing, and in my work it probably still boils down to the same thing.