An exhibition worth seeing: In Martinsried two conceptual artists, Munich Uli Schaarschmidt and Canadian Onni Nordman, show their works.
Martinsried - When science meets art, the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry (MPI) in Martinsried is absolutely right. Art exhibitions by national and international artists take place here at regular intervals. An exhibition by Munich's Uli Schaarschmidt and Canadian Onni Nordman has just opened with the double title "In Arbeit - Work in progress, Heimat München + Canada in Germany".
The Munich painter Uli Schaarschmidt met the Canadian Onni Nordman in Cape Breton Island, where Nordman lives. Both are conceptual artists and focus on special topics. This style (Conceptual Art) was coined by the US artist Sol LeWitt in the 1960s. The focus here is on the idea of a work, not its execution.
The works of these artists are not self-explanatory, so it is important to deal with the ideas of the artists. For the exhibition at the MPI, Onni Nordman tried to "understand the real" and explains his idea behind it as follows: "My cell studies are paintings that try to create an imaginative framework in which we can think about the basis of our being So he has developed a cycle of 20 pictures for this exhibition, including older works, as he has been involved in science for a long time.
His pencil-on-paper drawing “DNA Sculpture” is the best way of illustrating which pictorial metaphors he uses for his works: he drew a double helix from telephone books and a woman was sitting in the middle. Helix comes from the Greek and means swirl. Two parallel strands of macromolecules twist into each other like a screw, at Onni Nordman they are phone books. He wants to symbolize that there is more information in a single human DNA than in all phone books together. With his art Onni Nordman wants to "transform the rational into general knowledge" and thus convey "the poetics of his art".
Uli Schaarschmidt's works are also multi-layered, because they tell stories from the lives of people that Schaarschmidt captured on canvas in Nova Scotia. He has portrayed fishermen and captains, captured the life of a miner in a cycle of pictures, visited Indian tribes and depicted their myths in pictures. Among other things, Schaarschmidt has documented the stations, ergo the life of a miner, in a fascinating way: the center of the picture shows the miner's wedding in color. On the left and bottom edge of the picture he painted his life from birth to death with a black, white and yellow color like a kind of cinematic sequence of pictures. It is only through the artist's explanation that the viewer becomes aware of the intention behind the painting. The Munich artist understood how to capture "The miner's life path" on canvas with a lot of empathy and artistic ability.
Uli Schaarschmidt and Onni Nordman are masters of conceptual art and know how to paint their gift in a painterly way and with differentiated messages - worth seeing. Miriam Pietrangeli-Ankermann
The exhibition
"In Arbeit - Work in progress, Heimat München + Canada in Germany" can be seen until April 10 in the foyer of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, Am Klopferspitz 18 in Martinsried. Opening times: daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission is free.
