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until 02.07. | #3390ARTatBerlin | janinebeangallery presents from 28. April 2022 (Opening 27.04.) the solo exhibition On Deliverance by the artist Martin Stommel.
Martin Stommel’s painting is a statement in the restlessness of the world; a path, an attempt to find paradise from the inferno. His light regiments, the visionary compositions full of tension and drama, their expansive diagonals and gestures, the elongated bodies of the actors in his paintings all lead from the everyday to the question of meaning. In his pictures, the world and changeable fortune burst and fate roars in the eternal song of the world’s riddles. In this, the artist follows the fever of a Tintoretto (1518 – 1594) or Max Beckmann (1884 – 1950). Martin Stommel’s art-historical education, his brilliant artistic training under the famous Russian dissident Boris Birger, who came to Bonn as an immigrant, and his academy studies in Munich and Berlin lead him to a remarkably philosophical transformation of real visual experiences into insightful pictorial experiences, inspiring new pictorial solutions. The dynamism of the pictorial rewriting, the freedom of the choice of colour, the visionary reinterpretation in the formal solutions are rare qualities in the international art scene.
Martin Stommel, Europa, 2022,
Oil on canvas, 260 x 110 cm
Martin Stommel was born in 1969 and received his first artistic training from 1993 to 2001 from the Russian painter and dissident Boris Birger. Birger taught Stommel how to depict people, especially portraiture, how to work from nature and landscape painting. In the master’s studio he met outstanding representatives of art and culture even in these young years, the writer Lev Kopelev, the cellist Natalia Gutman, the then intendant Fritz Pleitgen and several fellow painters, in an atmosphere of lively criticism.
From 1994 – 1997, Stommel first studied at the State Art Academy in Munich with Prof. Bernhard Weißhaar. In 1998, he moved to the HdK Berlin to study with Klaus Fußmann.
In 2000 Stommel was received in London by the most important art theorist of the 20th century, Sir Ernst Gombrich, who encouraged the artist, who was about 30 years old at the time, in his inclination towards figurative work. During the last years of Gombrich’s life, an exchange of letters followed in which the scholar praised the painter as a “master of light and shadow”.
Martin Stommel, Jesus Asleep, 2022, Oil on canvas, 260 x 175 cm
From 2001 to around 2007, Stommel discovered the world of the circus for himself, creating images of circus performers and scenes in the ring. He portrayed the most famous clowns of our time, such as Oleg Popov, Francesco Caroli, David Larible and Fumagalli, and worked especially with Bernhard Paul’s Circus Roncalli.
In 2004, Stommel was invited by Prince Rainier III to exhibit his circus paintings in Monaco. When the famous Viennese surrealist Ernst Fuchs visited this exhibition in Monaco, a long-lasting contact and exchange resulted. Also during this time, a close relationship developed with the collector and gallerist Charlotte Zander, who had been one of the co-founders of the ArtCologne in 1967. Zander showed Stommel’s work in Bönnigheim Castle in 2003 and supported the painter until her death in 2014.
Martin Stommel, Kyna, 2022, Oil on canvas, 120 x 130 cm
In the early 2000s, Stommel’s thematic and stylistic orientation was particularly shaped by his many years of work on illustrations for Dante. He dealt with baroque and mannerist subjects and developed a dynamic alla prima technique. In terms of content, the depiction of man between myth and vision becomes the real source of his work.
Since the 2000s, Martin Stommel’s paintings have been shown in numerous exhibitions, including. at the Lehmbruck Museum, Kallmann Museum, Museum Charlotte Zander, Diözesanmuseum Trier, Stadtmuseum Bonn, in many gallery exhibitions in Frankfurt (Mühlfeld and Stohrer, Conzen, Witzel), Munich (Dürr), Rottach-Egern (Hyna), Berlin (artfein), Münster (Spiekerhof), Hamburg (Mensch), Salzburg (Neuhauser KM), Lüneburg (Meyer), Unkel (Oltmanns), and Zell a. H. (Arthus). Further exhibitions took place at the Théâtre Princesse Grace (Monaco), the Kopelev Forum (Cologne), the Catholic Academy in Bavaria (Munich) and at the Venice Biennale (European Cultural Center).
Martin Stommel, Kirke, 2022, Oil on canvas, 180 x 135 cm
Stommel’s works have been shown by various galleries at the German art fairs in Cologne, Karlsruhe, Berlin, Munich, Essen and Lübeck, at the “Salon der Gegenwart” in Hamburg and at the London Print Fair at the Royal Academy.
Works by Stommel are in public collections (including the Federal Minister of Economics, the former State Guest House Petersberg, the City of Wesseling, the City of Ismaning, the City of Bonn) and many private collections, such as Grillo (Duisburg), Slifka (New York), Klöcker (Frankfurt), Barthlott (Bonn) and Zander (Bönnigheim).
Vernissage: Wednesday, 27. April 2022, 5:00 – 8:00 pm. The artist is present.
Exhibition dates: Trusday, 28. April – Saturday, 2. July 2022
To the Gallery
Caption title: courtesy janinebeangallery, Martin Stommel, Dionysos Nikator, 2021, Oil on canvas, 250 x 450 cm
Exhibition Martin Stommel – janinebeangallery | Contemporary Art – Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries – ART at Berlin
