Siegburg - (asw) Two artists, two types, two points of view. Anyone visiting the exhibition at the Siegburg City Museum these days will find themselves confronted with a wealth of artworks in the rooms on the first floor.
Under the title "Ceci n'est pas uns rétrospective" (this is not a retrospective), the two painters present pictures that could not be more different.
Already in the foyer of the house, the visitor gets an insight. Once they have arrived in the rooms of the temporary exhibition, they first see the works of Walter Wolf. Oil or paper on canvas, pencil or crayon drawings, mixed media on paper.
Wolf, born in Trier in 1963, studied in Mainz and Frankfurt. He spent many years in Spain, New York and India. Since 1992 he has been working in Cologne. His pictures show faces, people standing there lost, colourful but sad, pessimistic, strange. The reality that Wolf paints is always an experience for him as well. He does not know beforehand what will emerge, allows himself to be carried away into the unknown, allows himself to be surprised. "Wolf's paintings show the inseparability of the spiritual and the physical," says Jürgen Kisters, who introduced the exhibition. The "so-called inner states" always have a visible expression in the body and its postures.
The works of Peter Valentiner are quite different. Born in Copenhagen in 1941, the French citizen now lives in Cologne, Tübingen and Paris. He has been friends with Wolf, whom he met in Trier in the mid-1980s, ever since. They never lost sight of each other, although they never tried to work together.
Anyone who sees their pictures would find it hard to imagine that either. And a joint exhibition?
They only hesitated for a moment, the chronicler reports, and asked themselves what it was that united their art.
"They quickly realised that this question already contained part of the answer. And he wonders whether it actually has to be the case that the different approaches are seen as competition; don't they complement each other?
This question is addressed to the viewer. Peter Valentiner presents black and white pictures to which he gives only one name "Hurricane" 1 to 30. Painted with ink and emulsion paint on paper, these oversized "spirals" overwhelm one. They look alike and yet each one is different. Perhaps one is looking into the eye of the hurricane, or perhaps it is galaxies that have been depicted. In any case, Peter Valentiner's works captivate the viewer and encourage him to think about the structures of nature, which are more powerful than man.
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