Christian Lemmerz: Krieg (projektrummet)

While Anders SCRMN Meisner’s Apricots and Freshwater Pearls is on view in the main gallery, Christian Lemmerz takes on the HAG project room with the exhibition “Krieg” that chronicles the first 100 days of the war in Ukraine.

Aside from his obvious and certifiable skills as a sculptor, Christian Lemmerz is also renowned for being a prolific and virtuose draughtsman producing both sketches for his sculptural works and large-scale drawings as monumental works in their own right. Through the years, he’s made brief and sporadic excursions into painting, but it wasn’t until the outbreak of Corona in early 2020 that he decided to almost exclusively channel his energy through the paintbrush, spontaneously documenting his thoughts and emotions while a global pandemic unfolded before his eyes.

Although the pandemic slowly petered out, Lemmerz kept up with his new method of using painting as a kind of visual diary, trying to make sense of the world through sketches. And thus, when suddenly a war erupted in Ukraine, the artist was already keeping a journal. He never really planned to paint the war, it just happened.

Christian Lemmerz explains his approach:

“Since the beginning of Corona, my art has increasingly taken the form of a diary or a sketchbook. I try to understand the events of each day in as simple, clear, and precise a manner as possible: not in a final form, but in an open, spontaneous movement. It is the interplay between mind, eye and hand that fascinates me, simply because the outcome is always uncertain, and because I often end up painting over my sketches again and again. This exhibition consists of a small selection of my daily attempts to render the horror of Putin’s invasion tangible.”

Kilde: Hans Alf Gallery