Isabelle Dyckerhoff
5 february – 4 june 2011opening 4 february 2011, 7 – 9 pm
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Horizonte 10, 2010.
Öl-Leinwand, 40 x 50cm.
Öl-Leinwand, 40 x 50cm.
FARBRÄUME
Colour is manifold. It is created by and within light, it is variable and contains colour tones that unfold and disappear again as the light falls, thus leading to the opacity that makes colour so fascinating.
To denote a colour we use words that define the properties of a colour tone, describe the degrees of
Isabelle Dyckerhoff paints colour-spaces that display all of these characteristics and properties of colour. In her painting she draws on and gives form to memories and imaginations of colour, presenting its temporality alongside the wealth of its tones. Her pictures thus develop a wide range of colour and sensuality. Playing with warm and cool tones and the haptic presence of colour as paint or varnish generates a manifold space for colour. Within this gesturally reduced field of painting, whose essence consists of openness and permissiveness, Dyckerhoff paints her lyrical pictures.
What is this lyrical element? It is a lightness that arises within the conjoined fields of form and colour. The many layers of colour, fields, and outlined shapes all resound together and adjacent to each other, within their close relations of mutual influence. In this way cross-referenced density and volume are generated, and individual colour values seem to dissolve into one manifold and multiple sense of colour, while at the same time the reverse transpires and single colours begin to emerge from the whole, to vibrate, to shift and expand beyond the outlines of shapes and forms. The colour field is thus always the background and foreground for individual essences of colour that both flow into it and resound from it. This is why it is possible to speak of lyrical spaces of colour in Isabelle Dyckerhoff‘s pictures, as the colours set off a narrative flow of countless fields of imagination and spaces of memory in the mind of the viewer. The space of painting becomes a poetical pictorial space.
The gesture and the shape of the colour fields, whether horizontally layered or facing each other in cell-like forms, whether delicately varnished or in dynamic movement, also create poetic moments in these paintings. The viewer can follow the various rhythms of movement in a painting, and in tracing them perceive the work as a multi-dimensional enclosed space. In Isabelle Dyckerhoff’s work the effects of colour are always designed to be manifold. Colour is a bearer of light and expansion in space, it is both material and subject. It is possible to experience this when looking at a painting from some distance, where the colours display an intensive and interlaced depth. When looking close up you see colours in superimposed layers, which reveal their tactile materiality, or in fine varnishes in which the canvas shines out like a tonal fabric.
berliner bilder 60, 2010.Öl-Nessel, 110 x 120cm.
Alongside the lyrical element, chance plays a significant role in Isabelle Dyckerhoff’s work. She allows the space for chance. The various acts of painting are highly concentrated. While painting Dyckerhoff balances out emphases, tensions, moments of resistance and harmonies within the space of the work, so that the picture gradually assumes its form via a very finely tuned process. The moment when the colours and the fields of the painting attain autonomy—somewhere between chance and conscious control—is the moment when the picture can now stand for itself. Dyckerhoff’s approach to painting means that each work has an aura of chance, permission, and also certainty, all reminding us of the natural world. Through the many decisions she makes when painting, Dyckerhoff forms a unique and authentic space for colour and its tones and manifestations. Form is a supporting painterly element in the process.
All of this – the lyrical, what is permitted, and the manifold – makes it necessary to look at the work with an open mind, knowing that painting in its original sense is and can be a transferring manifoldness. For Isabelle Dyckerhoff painting is above all an intense pleasure in the sensuality and the effects of colour, which stands and works as a value in itself. It is hardly possible to give a name to all of these differently sounding, pure and layered colours that a Dyckerhoff painting contains and that unfold there, for like light her painting is agile, rich in spectrum, and highly atmospheric.
Light lies in direct proximity to darkness. Isabelle Dyckerhoff also includes this characteristic of colour as a transparent and ephemeral element in her painting. Light and dark are sensual painterly stimuli flowing between an imagined depth and surface space. Darker colours always also contain bright nuances, as their graduations speak of time and recall memories of the past. From one painting to the next, Isabelle Dyckerhoff creates new variations or themes that have come about through her work on a picture – leading to the great variety of intensively bright and also dark colours, and of delicate surface varnishes and deep layers. With each new painting the painter embarks on a new beginning, which yet already encompasses comprehensive variety. One painting is like a fragment of Dyckerhoff’s entire work, while the variations are in the artistic format.
If the viewer is open to Dyckerhoff’s manifold spaces of colour and movements in colour, then colour becomes a sensual and also mental material. As colour effects unfold in the process and rhythms of seeing, they have an intense presence. Through this painterly sense of presence Isabelle Dyckerhoff unfolds the lightness and poetic materiality of colours that lie within the realm of painting.
Birgit Szepanski
berliner bilder 46, 2009-10. Öl-Leinwand, 160 x 150cm.
The artist lives and works in in Berlin and Münich.
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1959
- born in Büderich
- studies in Lausanne/Switzerland and Munich
- journalistische Tätigkeit
- Atelierprojekt, Munich
- Atelier in Berlin
- Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, Prof. Jerry Zeniuk
- Atelierförderung des Kulturreferats der Landeshauptstadt München
1978 – 1982
1982 – 2004
1997 – 2007
seit 2006
2006 – 2009
2009
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2011
- Farbräume, berlin art scouts, Berlin (E)
- www.hongkong-artproject.de, div Ausstellungen in Hongkong und China
- Our House Is Your House, München, Dresden, Prag; Galerie Dolmen, Prag
- Jahresausstellung Kunstverein Ebersberg (Katalog)
- Hypovereinsbank Ulm (E)
- Große Kunstausstellung Kunsthalle Villa Kobe, Halle/Saale (Katalog)
- Serial Killers, halle50, München
- Helvetia Wealth Group, Zürich (E)
- Galerie Patrizia Zewe (mit Hauchun Kwong), München (E)
- Farbcode München, Kunsthalle whiteBOX, München (Katalog)
- München X Rheinhessen, Kunstforum Rheinhessen/Essenheimer Kunstverein
- Unser Haus ist Euer Haus, Geh 8, Dresden
- Große Kunstausstellung Kunsthalle Villa Kobe, Halle/Saale (Katalog)
- 0X/01 Frise Kunstkammer, Hamburg
- Jahresausstellung Kunstverein Ebersberg (Katalog)
- AK 68,Grosse Kunstausstellung Wasserburg am Inn (Katalog)
- Schauraum, Kulturpassagen am Ackermannbogen, München
- Orangerie am Englischen Garten, München (E)
- Jahresausstellung Kunstverein Ebersberg (Katalog)
- Helvetia Wealth Group, Zürich (E)
- Schauraum – Ein Temporär-Projekt, München (E)
- AK 68, Grosse Kunstausstellung, Wasserburg am Inn (Katalog))
- Städtische Galerie Traunstein, Jahresausstellung Kunstverein Traunstein
- sandkasten, temporärer Ausstellungsraum, München (E)
- „Simultan“– Kunst und Schach, Kunstverein Ebersberg (Katalog)
- Freimanner Kulturtage, Dachgalerie Domagkateliers
- Process Consulting Köln (E)
- „All about...Domagk“, Kunsthalle whiteBox München
- Jahresausstellung Kunstverein Ebersberg (Katalog)
- Deutsches Herzzentrum München (E)
- Room for Living, Laren, Holland
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
Horizonte 4, 2009. Öl-Leinwand, 200 x 230cm.
The Two Parallel Worlds of Isabelle Dyckerhoff
What is good art – this is a question that will never find a satisfying answer, even if all requested criteria have been fulfilled. Also for an artist himself one of the most difficult things is to evaluate his own work once it has been completed. It is, therefore, quite legitimate to describe the creative process of painting as a hovering between intellectual decisions and intuition (spon-taneous work). Artists often speak about an inner drive that guides them through their work. Routine and ease on one hand or curiosity and daring on the other hand are the options an artist has. Within the abstract-expressionist painting one can rather watch stylistic movements than points of view. Nowadays with a strong tendency to realism in both painting and photo-graphy, abstract expressionism is, as a contrast, pure painting: its aim being the intensive correlation between composition and colour.
Within this field Isabelle Dyckerhoff works with various technical and stylistic terms of expression. In a very relaxed way she lets things happen without influencing them. Her work is diverse but always recognisable and authentic. This diversity in her work is a result of her accepting processes without interfering and without trying to guide them on an intellectual level. Dyckerhoff’s artistic process is also based on the improvement of her pic-torial statements. This process, however, does not happen in phases but in stylistic ideas that alternate as well as overlap within her pictures. The artist will for example construct a painting with very strong layers of colour and contours and a moment later she will work in light veils of pastel covering the next large canvas. It nearly seems as if she needed these strong contrasts to remain thrilled by her work.
Very different from the historical positions of abstract expressionism which succeded in undoing (disolving) shapes, her work rather seems to be devoted to the corporeal. Looking at Isabelle Dyckerhoff’s work the association of landscapes arise that are formed through cushions of colour positioned side by side. Often they look like detailed micro landscapes, and others even remind us of very colourful maps or patchwork quilts. Some paintings let us think of natural stone walls with their many different shapes and shades of colour in the sunlight. Others let us believe that we are looking in a blooming garden, and others again even seem to open up a view of the sky and clouds. This way reality is never quite out of reach. Per Kirkeby, the great Danish artist and nature scientist, whom our painter admires, works works in a similar way. He also directs the fantasy of the viewer within his abstract landscapes of colour onto areas that look like stone formations.
berliner bilder 45, 2009-10. Öl-Leinwand, 160 x 150cm.
Isabelle Dyckerhoff works partly with the spatula, scratching hatchings into the paint and creating agglomerations, in order to emphasize the densness of her oil paintings. Her style is gestural when she applies the amorphous zones of colour – and she takes great effort in using different techniques to differentiate certain areas.The layers of colour make a nearly three dimensional impression. In this way the paintings open up and offer the feeling of space and depth. The amount of layers and density of these oil canvases are extreemly packed with narrative elements and the viewer cannot help wanting to explore the paintings over and over again. This may also originate in their independence, as they do not want to resemble anything or evoke any associations.
In the more recent works there is a tendency towards reduction and figuration. There are horizontally constructed paintings (Berlin pictures no. 42), that can be interpreted as urban landscapes. They concentrate on giving hints of constructions and citylike areas, while dark grey and brown (the uncovered canvas) dominate the colour scheme and thus create the atmosphere.
Another group of recent works grow through the art of absence: in these paintings Dyckerhoff enjoys the lightness in her work even more and just uses thin layers of colour. Over a clearly grounded canvas she pours out cascades of fluffy colour that form a large arch. This new tendency in Dyckerhoff’s work was initiated by a group of smaller paintings that left a rather large part of the canvas untouched and set the idea of a landscape so lightly and casually that one believed in looking at followers of the Tunis pictures by August Macke (see „Isabelle Dyckerhoff, Paintings 3“, page 6).
The colours of a painting, as well as the strengh or lightness of the paint on the canvas, can provoke associations and transport feelings. Isabelle Dyckerhoff has a very good feeling in the use of colours and her variety is vast. She loves using very strong and luminous colours which she confronts with each other within the structure of the composition as if they had to generate energy like the two poles of a battery. But the artist also knows the importance of grounding: the energetic compositions are calmed down by muddy grey and brown tones. If one examines the individual colours one will discover that very few basic colours are being used. Almost every colour is a special mixture that has been created with care. The result are entirely individual worlds of colour which sometimes, through the strong contrasts, provoke a nearly aggressive tension within the paintings and in others they are woven together very harmoniously.
The contrasts are the most fascinating part of this oeuvre: a strong and gesturally well structured picture might be followed by an enormous painting in most delicate pastels, which only seem to be powdered on to the canvas - and the observer is attracted by both of these completely (controverse styles) different expressions of art.
Dr. Barbara Rollmann-Boretty