About Gerd Baukhage
Gerd Baukhage was born on July 10, 1911 in Herten.
He died in Cologne on March 1, 1998, leaving behind an extensive oeuvre of paintings, drawings and watercolors.
After brief periods of study in Munich (architecture) in 1932 and Düsseldorf (art) in 1933, he spent long periods of time in Switzerland. There, he made his living as a painter of watercolors. In 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and only returned home in 1949 after surviving as a prisoner of war, relocating to Cologne. He continued to study and develop his own distinct visual language in Cologne’s Lindenthal district.
The art world became aware of the paintings of 57-year-old Gerd Baukhage in 1968, when a new international style seemed to be replacing Pop Art encompassing photographic, hyperrealism and radical realism. At the time, Baukhage enlarged found objects – buttons, plastic rings, iron parts, boards – and turned them into increasingly large-format pictures. He brought them to maturity in the large group of works entitled “Versperrungen” (“Barriers”). In the early 1970s, he explored the rooms and equipment of the human execution machinery. From the late 1970s onwards, he reduced the motifs to rusty steel cover plates and inserted them into altar-like, earth-colored panels and triptychs. The archaic, timeless forms of the circle, triangle and square dominate his late work. His last painting was created in 1989, as Baukhage went blind in 1990.
From 1950 to 1997, the works of the artist Gerd Baukhage were shown in numerous exhibitions in Germany, Poland, Korea and Switzerland in museums, art associations, galleries and art fairs. In 1977, he participated with his works in the Documenta 6 exhibition in Kassel. His last exhibition to date took place at the Cologne City Museum in 2009. Museums such as the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, Museum Morsbroich and the LVR Landes Museum in Bonn have works in their collections.
In 1968, he married the doctor Maria Theresia Solbach, who was very committed to her husband’s estate after Gerd Baukhage’s death and, among other things, supported the biography of Wolfgang Becker published by the Wienand Verlag.
The artist’s written legacy is kept in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg and can be viewed there.
The majority of his artistic estate has come into the possession of the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum and the Friends of the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum e.V. and is kept, managed and exhibited by the latter.
Further information and references can be found at
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Baukhage
Texts by Gerd Baukhage, which he wrote down by hand on February 5, 1981:
First reflections on my painting
Pictures are signs of thought.
Pictures are emotional signs.
Pictures are structures and not images.
Pictures are color-form-structures.
Every form gives an experience of form.
The perfect form is the circle.
All forms of geometry are also rational forms of thought, forms of order.
Arbitrary forms and signs are more emotionally accessible.
- Basic forms of technology
- Signs of basic forms on material (iron, wood, etc.).
- Signs of the basic form as a phenomenon.
In painting, colors are properties of the depicted.
Even monochrome pictures are colored canvases or other colored picture carriers.
In nature, color is material-bound.
I can also give the depicted material a different artistic meaning by changing the color.
Drawing is giving form.
Every form can provide a legible or perhaps better a functioning compositional sign in the picture composition.
Clear forms are more memorable than confused forms.
Every shape has expressive value.
Every form that is clearly depicted can become a phenomenon.
About my way of pictorial representation
Depicting reality is the beginning of the painting profession. This painting is the learning of the manual part of the performing arts.
In the course of time one will learn that the things depicted contain possibilities of expression and experience. Reality becomes a sign. If I reduce these signs of reality to an abstract sign, they become signs of experience and thought, e.g. a depicted wheel or other round shape becomes a circular line, the painted horizon becomes a horizontal line, etc., etc. These signs of thought become compositions.
I assemble these mental symbols into compositions.
How do we fix these signs?
We wrote them on real material, such as paper, linen, but also on other materials, sometimes even in the sand. I paint these other materials on canvas and draw the signs on them.
In the beginning, I didn’t go so far as to turn lines into signs. I assembled real things into compositions; boards, metal parts such as iron plates, screws, building clamps and the like were put together to form object-like structures. The result was “obstructions”, object-like pictorial compositions that challenge you to break them open.
The picture as resistance.
Recently I have taken the painted form of the material as an element of experience, e.g. the square and the rectangle, the forms of the stretched canvas. In part, I have left them as color phenomena and do not compose any further. In some cases, I have combined them into compositions by placing them next to and on top of each other.
Once again briefly:
The path of representation goes from the representation of reality to the sign of reality, to the linear sign as a sign of thought and experience with which I can operate and compose.