You can download the exhibition flyer here.

Every year since 1970, Andreas Felger has been working on up to 50 sketchbooks filled with writing and images. Drawings, watercolors, sketches, engravings, collages, and handwriting transform the blank pages into artist’s books. There is no doubt that Felger not only works with these mostly bound, partly loose collections of sheets, he lives with them. He develops, discards, and documents ideas, notes down quotations, questions himself—as a sensing, searching, and creative human being. The longer we devote ourselves to the books, the deeper we see into the artist’s workshop.

The subjects of his sketches are as diverse as those of his entire oeuvre, and stylistically, all genres are explored in the books, from woodcuts, watercolors, oil paintings, reliefs, stained glass windows, and other works for public spaces to sculpture. Nevertheless, certain themes are emphasized: the local landscape, travel notes, spiritual themes, pictorial notes accompanying musical compositions, and abstract color-form relationships. Precisely because the sketchbooks are ‘not essential’, because they are not initially intended for public viewing but only for personal use, and therefore do not strive for perfection but rather for a draft, they give us insight into artistic practice at its source.

At the same time, there are countless correspondences to Felger’s public work, and the path from the initial idea to the finished result can be traced. The sketches are often documents of doubt, searching, and experimentation. The works, on the other hand, are complete – documents of skill and achievement. Only by looking at the birth and completion of the pictorial ideas can the works be recognized and appreciated in terms of their intellectual and material creation. The exhibition LEBENSLINIEN. Andreas Felger’s Sketches in the Context of his Art will present this whole picture in an exemplary manner.