Color Space Art  The "Mundus" series

Mundus (Latin) – in English: “the world”  

Our one world is made up of many individual worlds. Correspondingly, my “Mundus” paintings are, on the one hand, an allegory of the variety in our world; on the other hand, they stand for the unity that arises from this variety – or that endures in spite of it. 

Mundus gets its tension from the overall impression as well as from each individual image: individual quadrangles which represent parts of our world are next to each other – small pieces of the big picture that emerges.

At the beginning of a Mundus, I develop a grid that is broken up by quadrangular colour elements. In a lengthy process, I use a palette knife to work on each of the quadrangular fragments. The colour composition plays a key role here. For this reason, Mundus can also come into being in different colours and colour combinations and, as a result, produce different effects – just as our world reveals entirely different colours, moods and possibilities. Once each individual small world – after many layers of paint have been applied – has developed its own story, I intensify certain emerging elements, in some cases by chance and in others by design, or at least subtly. In this way, one grid and a great number of colourful quadrangles combine to form one painting with many different images. Or to put it differently: one system and a multitude of elements give rise to one world that takes on a life of its own and contains many different smaller worlds. 

Although there are constants in my Mundus paintings – just as the people who view them, and the world they live in, are different, so too are the paintings which, on the one hand, are the object of observation but, on the other hand, themselves aim to produce a certain effect in the observer. However, “certain” effect does not mean the “same” effect. The idea is to take the observer on a journey while leaving the final destination open. Therefore the images are also abstract. They are intended to allow space for associations; each image is not just one image – it is one image for one observer and a different one for another observer. If the observer can feel this effect – the art has moved something inside of us. And that is its purpose.