Page 42 - Studio International - October 1966
P. 42
Above left
Hausjürgen Grammer
Drawing 1963
55 1/8 x 67 in.
Above centre
Gerd Hanebeck
Painting 1965
Mixed Media
47 1/4 x 39 3/8 in.
Above right
Anke Holfeld
Watercolour 1962
Right
Christine Meschede
Collage 1966
19 5/8 x 25 1/2 in.
Far Right
Dagmar Zepter
Gouache 1966
33 7/8 x 23 5/8 in.
formed into a kind of esoteric ornament : again a 'coat- lines and points, rhythmic, staccato, almost dry. Here
of-arms' for the invisible. In the new generation the most ornament evolves out of dynamics. Bernd Völkle was
consistent follower of this line is Kriemhild Flake of another infant prodigy, with one-man shows at 20. The
Hamburg. Her work shows clear traces of the influence over-confidence which resulted often makes his work
of southern Spanish medieval ornament. She has gone to loose. But at their best his collage-paintings have
Spain (as the Cubists went to the Congo and the Ivory authority. The Action Painting rhythms with which he
Coast) for a visual tradition extinct in Western Europe. started are constructed in a way one could call hier-
The Cubists looked for formal, plastic formulae; she archical.
looked for graphic signs and symbols. It is the same
search for roots, not in the rational traditions long grown In Germany, as everywhere, there is a neo-figurative
meaningless, but at the base of human culture. Kim tendency. In its first form this evolved figuration from
Flake's modern icons draw on myths and legends we have the painting process. Roswitha Lüder of Hagen has
almost lost. They project this with concentration and worked on this since she came out of art school. At 31,
great plastic density. The whole ornamental tendency she is one of its leading exponents—and not just in the
seems to me one attempt to break way from insularity in younger group. Her imagery has kept its early ambiguity,
time, the consequences of which C. G. Jung described in but shifted from the anthropomorphic (a still-life trans-
his autobiography. forming into a figure-group and back again) to a basis
Manfred Wotke of Bochum, an exact contemporary of which is on the whole a landscape one. Her colour-sense,
Kriemhild Flake, is a graphic artist. He is more linear, especially within the lower register, is certainly one of the
geometric, optical, with elements which lie between best in German art just now. Her brush-work has
turning machines and Aztec suns. But the two are work- slashing attack, clean execution and a power reminiscent
ing in parallel. R. A. Scholl (Cologne) and Bernd of Orozco. Oversensitive reporters often wince at its
Völkle (Müllheim in Baden) come to ornament from the `brutality'.
informel. Scholl works in many media: glass windows, Gerd Hanebeck (Remscheid) is four years younger and
metal reliefs, painting, drawing, and etching. This may not yet fully developed. His basis is clearly the figure; but
have held him back, for now at 35 he has just found him- with the same ambiguity. He, too, has a sense for dark
self. He has got rid of the soft charm which tends to hang tones and can paint, as it were, against the light. The
on painting in Cologne and developed a graphic style of result is a kind of silhouette, but all the shifts of tone,
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