untitled
Anyone familiar with Andreas Felger’s work will immediately be intrigued by the two pictures presented here because they are different: Material, collage elements, writing and an application of colour that does not produce a painting or a sketch, but appears unfiltered raw. The painting surface, which has been incorporated into the picture over a large area, is also raw: coarse linen with strips woven into it at regular intervals. The collage begins with this (used) fabric, the integration of non-pictorial elements into the art, as it already had another function as a sack for transport in farming life. In his later years, Andreas Felger returned to the country, to his parents’ house, and here one does not necessarily have a farmer’s existence – like Andreas’ father, Georg Felger – but a rural one, and so the sackcloth will have been a found object that remains recognisable as such, both pasted and painted.
The fact that pictures open up very personal dimensions was one of the themes of the exhibition Lifelines. Andreas Felger’s sketches in the context of his art. The sketchbooks in particular provided a glimpse into the artist’s workshop, not only materially, but also intellectually and emotionally. The history of his life and the development of his work could be traced using a few lines as examples. In Untitled, on the other hand, the material takes the foreground and is used either intentionally or intuitively by Andreas Felger: The two stretched burlap sheets (art historically in the good tradition of Arte Povera) ‘tell’ a summarised history of the work:
The work with textiles, raw or printed, refers to the origins of Felger’s art. Expressive painting, often in bright colours, and geometric abstraction followed in later years. All three aspects and finally also the writing, which looks like a print but is recognisable as hand-painted on closer inspection, combine to create compositions that are not easily accessible. Roughly applied colours, blotchy canvas, irregular contours … do not make it easy for the viewer. But they bear witness to how and with what the artist works, comparable to roughly hewn wood that was not intended to be smoothed and polished, but instead unfolds its own material power as a workpiece. This is a homage: to his father, to the harvest in the Swabian Alb with sacks full of apples, to the fascination that emanates from bright colours and their spatiality on the surface – unadorned, but close to their origins.
Text by Marvin Altner
Marvin Altner holds a doctorate in art history and is a lecturer in art studies at the University of Kassel. After a traineeship at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, he worked as a research assistant and curator at museums in Berlin and Hamburg and as a freelance author in the field of visual arts from the 19th century to the present. Since 2012, he has been teaching at the Kunsthochschule Kassel in the art studies program and works as a research assistant for the Andreas Felger Kulturstiftung, including as author, exhibition coordinator, and supervisor of the database of Andreas Felger’s works.