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Mark Tobey |
The BAUKUNST GALERIE presents her seventh great exhibition with works by the important American artist Mark Tobey. The actual solo exhibition comprises a broad selection of paintings from 1950 to 1970, among them are 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 give an introduction into the work 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, Seattle, then went to Europe, South England, to Mexico, Asia and the Middle East. 1960 he finally settled in Basel in Switzerland, were 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 great 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. 2002 the Kunsthalle Bremen showed his works together with works by Morris Graves and John Cage in a great exhibition, which 2003 went to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, U.S.A..
Tobey is one of the most important American painters after 1945. He can be designated a precursor of the Abstract Expressionism. Though, his works in a sense are not to be called ‚abstract’, because they apply to observations of our real environment: They mirror for example the chaotic rhythm of life in a modern metropolis. Mark Tobeys paintings are refering 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 coalesced with his life in Western culture. Believing, that there is no gap between nature, art, culture and technical developments in human life, that the movements of our life mirror itself in the complex structure of a leaf as well as in the pulsating flow of all traffic in a big city, Tobey has revealed in his paintings the structures, currents, and patterns, that underly all elements of life.
The exhibition in the BAUKUNST GALERIE also presents Mark Tobeys’ „white writings“ - paintings, in which linear structures as an „all-over“-composition spread over the whole surface. In Tobeys paintings the coloured background is often covered by countless teeniest signs. The eyes move around without any real fixed points in this network of lines, and because of this cancellation of all purposeful action, the movement becomes an act of meditation. As in the East-Asian art painting leads to contemplation and evoces creative power, in the works by Mark Tobey silence and inner contemplation are being made educible.
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