Context

Directly next to a small still life with a lemon hangs a non-objective picture. What is the context of these two paintings? A difficult question. What does this still life have in common with the non-objective picture? A question that can be easily answered by looking at both pictures. The answers are more subtle and varied than expected.

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