Helmut Dorner
Germany, 1952
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From 1976 to 1982 Helmut Dorner was a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy where, like other artists of his generation, he had Gerhard Richter as a teacher. At the beginning of his artistic career, in the early eighties, he worked mainly in drawing and plaster and wood sculpture. That was the time of his exhibitions at the Rolf Ricke Gallery in Cologne and the Wuppertal Kunst- und Museumsverein. His almost organic sculptures contain constant references to the continuity and rupture of forms in space, sustained by an apparent material fragility. The rough treatment of his finishes, in which we can see the traces of the artist's hands, endows the pieces with a predominantly graphic value. That was how he did not take long to adopt painting as the main support for his creation, though usually with references to volume. His pictures are proof that certain art traditions -among them careful manual work and a detailed study of the aesthetic impact- can survive alongside contemporary tendencies such as Minimalism or Conceptual Art and take in the influence of cultures far from Europe, such as Asian. Dorner has shown his works on a very few occasions -he did not have an exhibition in the USA until 1994-, whilst he has concentrated on his teaching activity at the Karlsruhe Art Academy. He lives in Düsseldorf.
Ferran Barenblit