IN THE HEAVENS

Rehabilitation Clinic Bad Sebastiansweiler
12.2.–1.7.2023

The exhibition IN THE HEAVENS shows a selection of Andreas Felger’s latest oil paintings, most of which were created last year in his studio K(apelle) in Bad Sebastiansweiler. In addition to the current oil paintings of the Swabian Alb, a theme that Felger has previously depicted primarily in watercolours and woodcuts, the exhibition focuses on the 14-part oil painting cycle OUR FATHER. The title IN THE HEAVENS refers to this and at the same time points beyond it. Andreas Felger thus follows the Limburg theologian Peter Jentzmik, from whose new translation of the Lord’s Prayer the exhibition title is taken. Jentzmik has ventured to reformulate this centuries-old prayer, and Felger’s renewed engagement with the Lord’s Prayer also stems from his desire to make the meaning of one of the oldest prayers in Christianity artistically visible and legible again for our time.

In 2004, Felger created a series of watercolours on the theme of the Lord’s Prayer. Now, almost 20 years later, he is revisiting the subject with oil paints. This reflects the artist’s intense focus on oil painting in his later work. Watercolour emphasises flatness, lightness and transparency, whereas oil painting allows for greater density, a more extensive depth of pictorial space and a blurring of boundaries. The artist works in layers, reworking, enriching, immersing himself in an image space that has been expanding the reality of the picture surface sensually and spiritually since well before the Romantic era. Time is stored in the works through the production process, their form determined by the artist’s inner and outer search, by his intuition.