Günter Tollmann « Paperworks »

Born in Gelsenkirchen (Westphalia) in 1926, Günter Tollmann first knew France at the age of seventeen as a prisoner of war. This came shortly after his arrest by by the German authorities which sentenced him for satirizing ranking Nazis in a cabaret act.

From that time, it became his habit to spend at least part of the year in France until his death in 1990.

Consistent with affinities for both Germany and France, Tollmann's work bears witness to the artistic strains of each country's tradition, especially regarding the immediate generation of his parents. Despite all it's diversity from one decade to the next, it remains both a synthesis and an extension of both German Expressionism and The School of Paris.

Tollman's work is Expressionist in its assertion that art had become removed from its fundamental purpose which was to express feeling ( « aesthetic » derives from the Greek aestheitikos : feeling ), that a fundamental conveyance of feeling is color, usually in accordance with Goethe's association of particular colors with corresponding emotional states. It is Expressionist in its spontaneity, and overt « roughness » of aspect which repudiates the formal refinement which Expressionists regarded as decorative and an impediment to authenticity of emotion.

Despite its consciousness of such principles and preferences, Tollmann's work bears little apparent resemblance to that of his seniors in Germany because it integrates many of the formal innovations of the School of Paris without relinquishing its emotional power.

Tollmann is Parisian in his capacity to use line to generate dynamic complexes of space which are autonomous to painting, at the same time he anchors the image by means of an identifiable referent. He is Parisian in his disposition to use spatial dynamics of abstraction to supplant conventions of composition, and in the tension between abstraction and figuration which is a general feature of his work.

As a synthesis of two dominant but opposed tendencies of the early twentieth century , Gunter Tollmann poses not only a theoretical innovation, but an implicit longing for reconciliation through art.

 

--Drew Hammond, Paris, 2005