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until 28.08. | #3061ARTatBerlin | Galerie Brockstedt presents 10th June 2021 in the exhibition “Szenario” paintings and drawings by the artist Rocco Hettwer.
“Our Life – Dramatic Snapshots of a Film”
Anyone who has seen the pictorial creations of the painter Rocco Hettwer, born in 1964 in Wurzen, Saxony, who is now being shown again at the Galerie Brockstedt, knows that he is concerned with the exciting staging of figure in the room. Again and again he lets his figures act on a stage space dramatised with light and shadow, thus increasing their expressive power.
Rocco Hettwer, Der Zopf, 2021, 52 x 42 cm, Oil on canvas
In this way, he stands in the tradition of a realism that was shaped not least by his years at the Weißensee Art Academy, but which is not – as was once the case in the Renaissance – concerned with a race against reality, but with a personally shaped present-day psychogram of the individual, his sensitivities, his hardships. And we, the viewers, in our encounter with his works, in turn unfold individual thoughts through our respective different stories and imprints.
Rocco Hettwer, Lilli im blauen Kleid, 2020, 120 x 80 cm, Oil on canvas
The artist himself on his goal: “Happy if the result has a stimulating world of imagination, an intangible character that keeps the viewer’s imagination in constant tension that cannot be satisfied by any solutions”. He is obsessed with the idea that art offers the chance to put the artist’s subjective view of contemporary reality up for discussion. For despite their initially classic-looking mode of representation, his pictorial compositions thus have a message for us people of today.
Rocco Hettwer, Saskia, 2020, 120 x 80 cm, Oil on canvas
The idea of the dramatic runs through the artist’s entire oeuvre and, in his own view, even increases to the “conviction that acting is true life, and the rest of life is only an artificially extended pause without content”.
Rocco Hettwer, Saskia I, 2019, 21 x 29,7 cm, Tuschlavis on cardboard
If Rocco Hettwer’s mysterious and enigmatic paintings had already captivated you in the last exhibitions at Galerie Brockstedt, you can now look forward to an exciting further development of his basic dramatic idea in the newer oil paintings and watercolours: with increasing blurriness, his painterly brushstrokes seem to further emphasise the fluid boundaries between dream and reality, these different levels of consciousness, as he also often shows his figures in daydreaming reflection. He brings the existential questions “Where do we come from?” and “Where are we going?” into focus with deliberate pathos, also intensified by dramatically heightened contrasts of light and dark, modelled by colourful grey valeurs that already fascinated him in the Spanish Baroque painters.
Rocco Hettwer, War es hier?, 2018, 220 x 270 cm, Oil on canvas
He wants to touch and challenge us emotionally right now: Would there be a greater topicality than last year’s “scenario” to exchange with each other about the essentials of being human?
Text: Barbara Brockstedt, Juni 2021, Translation: ART@Berlin
Rocco Hettwer: Born 1964 in Wurzen/Saxony; painter; apprenticeship as a book printer; evening studies in painting at the HGB Leipzig; studies at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art; 1995 diploma; 1996 master student with D. Goltzsche; guest student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Bordeaux/France; various scholarships; since 1999 in Berlin.
Advance booking is requested: Tel 030-885 05 00, Dr. Uta Schnell (u.schnell@brockstedt.com)
The current hygiene rules apply.
Vernissage: Thursday, 10 June 2021, 4:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Exhibition dates: Thursday, 10 June to Saturday, 28 August 2021
To the gallery
Image caption cover image: Rocco Hettwer, War es hier?, 2018, 220 x 270 cm, Oil on canvas
Exhibition Rocco Hettwer – Galerie Brockstedt | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibition Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
