The casual view of everyday life is the starting point of Friedhelm Falke’s painterly work. Falke processes spatial illuminations, wall colorations or the merging of light and space as brief, barely consciously perceived impressions of empty rooms, dark garages or nocturnal windows in passing into abstract compositions. In the visualization of fleeting and unconscious moments, he reduces reality to the triad of color, form and surface. Memories of peripheral places, architecture and light landscapes penetrate the painterly structure of his geometric color surfaces like an echo. However, Falke does not aim for spatial and object-related associations. His paintings are interpretations of remembered vision. The painterly condensation of reality into glazed colour spaces, which are interrupted by high-contrast areas, reveal seeing and remembering as constructs themselves.
Ursula Schöndeling , Heidelberger Kunstverein , 8.2018
Friedhelm Falke
- 1958 born in Verden / Aller
Studied at the University of Fine Arts Braunschweig - 1986 Scholarship of the Kunstverein Hannover
- 1990 Barkenhoff Scholarship, Worpswede
- 1991 German Artists’ Association Prize
- 1992 Villa – Massimo – Scholarship, Rome
- 1995 Scholarship of the artist’s residence Schloß Bleckede
- 1997 Annual Scholarship of the State of Lower Saxony / Scholarship Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral, Bad Ems
- 1999 Winner of the Art Prize of the Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken
- 2011 Working scholarship of the Stiftung Kunstfonds
The artist's pictorial motifs usually owe their origin to observations he has made in everyday life, which he characterises as "incidental". These can be, as Friedhelm Falke explains, the "illuminations of a room, a certain colouring of the walls or the merging of light and space". Falke's works take reality as their starting point, but show a reality all of their own, which is profoundly abstract in the literal sense of the word.
Excerpt from the text by Michael Stoeber, Katalog Kunstsammlung
WGZ Bank Düsseldorf, 2014