Harald Reiner Gratz - Epos
We warmly invite you and your friends to the opening with Harald Reiner Gratz on Saturday, July 8, 2017, at 8 PM in our Erfurt gallery.
A preview will be available from 6 PM.
On the same day, the artist invites you to the Angermuseum Erfurt.
There, at 4 PM, the extensive exhibition "Harald Reiner Gratz: Luther's Stone in Schmalkalden and Other Oddities of German History" will open.
Prof. Dr. Kai Uwe Schierz will give an introduction. A catalog will be published.
The exhibition runs until September 3, 2017.
Angermuseum, Anger 18, 99084 Erfurt, Tuesday to Sunday from 10 AM to 6 PM.
Until July 22, we will be open as usual: Tuesday to Friday from 1 PM to 6 PM, Saturday from 11 AM to 4 PM. After that, we will take a summer break and will open our gallery by appointment.
Our visual memory is more than ever shaped by artificial images. They overlay reality and obscure it. From how many films do we know Jesus Christ? Was there really a racetrack in Jerusalem, or was that just a fabrication in "Ben Hur"? Was Salomé brunette or blonde?
Harald Reiner Gratz – a passionate painter and a well-versed cinephile – responds to such petty considerations with a bold and creative twist. He takes it upon himself to cast both historically verified and entirely invented characters. He recruits his actors from imagination, media, and his circle of friends and acquaintances. Salomé can be both plump and slender, and she can sport any hair color. Nero resembles a young Silvio Berlusconi, and the Colosseum – once a site of public slaughter and a well-built monument to human cruelty – looks like a sumptuous pastry.
Historical figures in Gratz's work take on many poses – of doubt, contemplation, ambition, fear, or clumsiness – but rarely that of grandeur or grace (one of his many Salomés is granted the latter exception). They remain human, more driven than creators.
Gratz's painting is always lush and spontaneous. His lavish use of precious pigments visibly satisfies the artist. If one were to arbitrarily divide his canvases and panels into segments, one would find small islands of exquisite color. The brushwork references both the Expressionists and younger masters. Certain sections appear as art historical quotes, reminiscent of Greco, Velázquez, and the old Titian.
"You can feel the unrestrained joy of the storyteller, who likes to add something mysterious to familiar tales, who exposes the characters to the metamorphoses of his imagination, who whimsically brushes against the grain of a story's meaning to see what comes out of it..." Kai Uwe Schierz