BENEN-DIKEN-HOF® GALLERY
Exhibition
Folkert Rasch
Pictures from the Sea
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Since 5 May 2022, “Folkert Rasch” will be our guest with his exhibition “Pictures from the Sea”. It comprises approx. 40 exhibits created in the last years 2021 – 2022. This highlight of Sylt’s art scene will be on display until 12 April 2023.
The exhibition Folkert Rasch . Pictures from the Sea at the BENEN-DIKEN-HOF® GALERIE is represented by
Galerie & Kunsthaus NOTTBOHM
Christoph Langer
Kurze Geismarstr. 31
37073 Göttingen
GERMANY
+49 (05 51) 45 90 5
hallo@nottbohm.de.
www.galerie-nottbohm.de
Folkert Rasch is not a pure representative of realism, nor of naturalism, because the viewer of his pictures does not experience any confirmation of the familiar contexts that objects have in everyday life. Rather, materiality and thinghood are emphasised. Houses, boats, lighthouses and trees appear more “striking” in the pictures than in the landscapes we know from our own experience. Rasch makes the “basic human need to order” his own in the construction of his pictorial world. The division in the pictorial space often follows the golden ratio. Compositionally as well as conceptually, his pictures show a strict order of their own, especially of the iconic moments. …I am fascinated by the De Chirico, Hopper, Hodler line. De Chirico in particular captivated me with his call for a “new astronomy of things”. (…) The pictorial objects I choose are connected with my own experiences and adventures, but in my painting I am always concerned with the exemplary, e.g. with the near and the far, with the constructed and the grown, with the dwelling and the unsheltered of nature, with the simple existence of things and their mysterious suchness, their physical corporeality and their metaphysical content (…).
Conversation between Folkert Rasch and Pastor Erich Witschke
About the artist Folkert Rasch
Folkert Rasch was born in Wilhelmshaven in 1961. In 1984 he began studying painting at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts under Professors Lienhard von Monkiewitsch and Hermann Albert. In 1990 he became a master student of Professor Albert and began his artistic career in Hamburg. Folkert Rasch has lived and worked in Cologne since 1992.
Source . www.folkert-rasch.de
FOLKERT RASCH . By the sea
Folkert Rasch’s world of ideas concentrates on landscape spaces, shallows and motifs from the sea. The artist’s painted world becomes a homage to the proportions of the golden section and the “distant proximity” of landscapes and deep space.
Pleasant expanse and air-shimmering illusion of the eye on the one hand, and at the same time an echo of man’s eternal search for peace and places that breathe eternity. An important quote for the perfectionist and painter Folkert Rasch is one by Rimbaud:
“Eternity, it is found where the sun unites with the sea.”
For over twenty years, painter Folkert Rasch has been preoccupied with seascapes, mainly inspired by his annual excursions to Sylt. In his works, these depictions literally become “seascapes”. No, not as a documentation listing earth and sky and all that exists between these dimensions, but rather in the sense of a magic touch that presents the supposedly familiar in a completely new way. The images of the sea function almost like a pull, you involuntarily run to the horizon and get lost in the magic of the distance in the most positive sense of the word. For a brief moment, one forgets the here and now and experiences the images completely individually, but always in connection with highly private chains of associations to which this world docks. Light-flooded morning landscapes or water reflections of the summer sky, a piece of one’s own many experiences and associations with the theme of the sea always resonates, for some childhood memories and for others a philosophical question of meaning.
Experiencing the inner in the view of the outer, this also reveals the immediacy of the almost inexhaustible aspects of seascapes. At first glance, these depictions seem like transparent spectacles of nature; at second glance, they offer a projection surface for longings and mental journeys, and it is precisely in this function that these images pose riddles and make one’s own standpoint in the here and now seem very relative. The questions of meaning and sensual walks are immanently linked to the theme of seascapes; from German Romanticism to the present day, nothing has changed in terms of the fragility of human existence or the resulting search for a place to locate one’s own existence. Nevertheless, these pictures are also simply perfect painterly craftsmanship:
Messages assembled from light and powerful clarity, first extracted from whole groups of meanings to then form a cosmos that picks up the frequency and rhythm of these sea motifs .
One almost thinks that each new motif from this thematic circle subsumes the many experienced scenes at the sea that the artist stores in his locks of memory, but this is precisely not the explanation for the magic of his pictorial worlds. Only this painter’s very idiosyncratic point of view has turned what he has seen into an idealised motif, enchanted and reshaped it as a positive utopia – no it is not reality.
These pictures are condensations and at the same time documentations of forays of a hunter who sees his works as a counter-image to reality and composes images of longing. They are woven with an extreme directness and at the same time with paradisiacal undertones and this peculiarity of Folkert Rasch’s personal objective is the basis for the fascination that is inherent in them.
What is special about the seascapes is at the same time what is special about Folkert Rasch’s pictures, the versatility and the extreme condensation of energies in a very small space. When did you last see pictures that breathe eternity?
Ute Kaldune . Art historian
