Bertold Mathes: Ausrichtung

In March and April 2019 Galerie1214, Berlin, is showing works by artist Bertold Mathes (*1957, living in Waldkraiburg and Berlin). The artist himself is responsible for the selection and the installation of his works in view of the gallery's showroom. Mathes' paintings and drawings are addressing basic themes, basic forms and basic colors in an attitude of openness and strictness at the same time. The colourfulness of the images and the metabolism of the graphic form reveal how the artist works, as it were, on the grammar of a language in the mode of its discovery and - simultaneously - transcription. The "spiritual in art" (das Geistige in der Kunst) that Kandinsky used to refer to, is an important category to understand Mathes' work in its pictorial sense, not as a symbolically loaded vocabulary. The astonishing degree of freedom of formal design, which manifests itself in this work, leads at the same time to absurdity the prophecies of doom that proclaim an 'obsolescence of painting in the digital age'.

Furthermore a dense text written in the context of a catalogue with the Kienzle Art Foundation in 2017 states:

"In the pictures of Bertold Mathes, there is a multitude of painterly form and a maximum of subjective questions about paradoxical relations such as material and imagination, emotion and reflection, or decoration and spiritual experience.

The application of image, colour and work systems, as well as their criticism and quasi-sabotage through 'over affirmation' of a deliberately crafted execution or targeted by inadequate but seriously meant emotional painterly response determine the work processes that sometimes develop in series of works over years.

The recognizability of his pictures, their sense and their meaning emerge and incorporate in work groups, in constant shifts and the construction of internal counter-positions. In recent years, Mathes focussed repeatedly on single images that, when inserted into the work complex, illuminate, structure and weight it, thus making visible its open and flexible position and the fragility of meaning in a positive manner.

This constant experimentation and redefinition of the possibilities of painting as a fluid medium, leads to images filtered out of an endless canon of available possibilities, whose visual findings are readable challenges for the viewer."

(© Archive Bertold Mathes)