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Mark Tobey |
The Baukunst Galerie presents its seventh large exhibition with works by the famous American artist Mark Tobey. The actual solo exhibition comprises a broad selection of paintings from 1950 to 1970, amongst others important works from international private collections. The opening takes place on Wednesday, the 20th of October, 6-8 p.m.; on this occasion, Matthias Bärmann will deliver an insight into the works of the artist.
Mark Tobey was born on the 11th of December 1890 in Centerville/Wisconsin. After a childhood in the country at the Mississippi, he spent his ‘nomadic’ life in Chicago, New York City and Seattle, and went to Europe, South England, to Mexico, Asia and the Middle East. 1960 he finally settled down in Basel in Switzerland, where he died on the 24th of April 1976. Mark Tobey was honoured 1958 with the Price for Painting of the XXIX. Biennial in Venice as the first American Artist after James Whistler. 1961 the Louvre in Paris presented a grand retrospective, and 1962/63 the M.o.M.A. in New York, followed by further solo exhibitions, as in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid 1997/98. In 2002 the Kunsthalle Bremen showed his works together with works by Morris Graves and John Cage in a major exhibition, which moved to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington (USA) in 2003.
Tobey is one of the most important American painters after 1945. He can be designated a precursor of the Abstract Expressionism. Though his works cannot be literally called ‚abstract’, because they apply to observations of our real environment: They mirror for instance the chaotic rhythm of life in a modern metropolis. Mark Tobey’s paintings are referring to an inner experience of space instead of space in the sense of perspective.
Influences from Western and Eastern art found their way into the oeuvre of the artist. Eastern spirituality merged with his life in Western culture. He believes that there is no gap between nature, art, culture and technical developments in human life and that the movements of our life are mirrored in the complex structure of a leaf as well as in the pulsating flow of urban traffic. Therefore Tobey reveals in his paintings the structures, flows and oscillating patterns, which form the basis of all elements of life.
The exhibition at the Baukunst Galerie also presents Mark Tobeys’ ”white writings“ – paintings in which linear structures spread over the whole surface as an ”all-over“-composition. In Tobey’s paintings the coloured background is often covered with countless tiny signs. In this network of lines the eyes of the spectator move around without any fixation points. This abolishment of purposeful action turns the eye movement into an act of meditation. As in the East-Asian art, where painting gives rise to contemplation and holds creative, evocative power, the works of Mark Tobey embody silence and inner contemplation.
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