29.07.2015

27. Online-Exhibition · Horst Scheffler

„Thus art becomes more real with each day that makes our life more artificial“ states Horst Scheffler (*1935) who had started with a carpentry apprenticeship followed by years at Werkkunstschule Hanau and Hamburg (Schools of Arts and Crafts) before he was granted his first scholarship as an artist.

Since the 1960s Scheffler’s focus in his pictorial works have been set on the subject of energy. In this way he began to analyze his motifs according to criteria such as proximity and distance as well as movement and statics so that a work of art could emerge from the intellectual substrate which had nothing to do with the figurative reality.

As an artist, Scheffler’s position is that art must not be a copy of reality but has to dig much deeper and open up new intellectual spaces which would lie idle without art as a trigger.Up until today, Horst Scheffler’s constructed Raum-Bilder have lost nothing of their relevancebut are in fact highly topical works - which is why we want to honor them in our online exhibition.

Scheffler’s portfolio HSp21 printed at Domberger in 1970 is the prototype of art that distrusts fleeting reality and demands full concentration. It is the kind of art that accompanies a viewer for years, one that is never “finished looking at” but is composed and constructed in such a subtle way that one can only accommodate through sustained viewing.

Scheffler considers himself a representative of concrete constructivist art whose followers materialize intellectual contents and refuse any symbolic language. “… because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface.“ is one of the guidelines of concrete art as written down by Theo van Doesburg in 1930.

Structure, thinking and technical perfection make up the core of this kind of art. In this way not only works of art oft he 20th century remain valid but maintain a keynote and representthe esthetic imperative oft he 21st century.

With his art, Horst Scheffler wants to make life more artificial in order for us to endure or respectively shut out the multitude of trivial moments in our everyday lives in a better way.

Nothing other than that is what Oscar Wilde had tried – even though by completely other stylistic means. He wrote “Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference.”

On this note we wish you an artistically sensitive summer and would like to encourage you to make your life more artificial with good art.

27. Online-Exhibition please click here