Ralph Fleck. Colour

In spring 2015, Museum Küppersmühle Duisburg will show the paintings of Ralph Fleck in an extensive exhibition. As an ouverture, Galerie Boisserée is presenting Ralph Fleck in autumn 2014 (September 5 – October 18) with a fine selection of his paintings of the most recent years. Ralph Fleck - born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1951 - was last shown in Cologne by Bogislav von Wentzel (1988 and 1990) and by Jeane von Oppenheim (1992).

For years, he occupies a singular position in Germany. His works are represented in numerous private and public collections and in museums like the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung München, Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Schloß Moyland, Sprengel Museum Hannover or Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg to mention a few. In cities like London, Amsterdam, Madrid or Seoul the particular quality of his paintings finds more and more interest.

Ralph Fleck is a painter. Painting is the only subject that preoccupies him. His subjects range form busy cityscapes and human crowds, to subtly monochromatic paintings of the Alps that have an almost Zen sense of stillness.

The basis of Ralph Fleck’s work is representational. He embraces the scale of modern life. His eye takes in cities and their inhabitants with a generous panoramic view. “Essentially, all of his works are still-life paintings – with wall-to-wall bookshelves, crowds of people, Alpine panorama, land- and cityscapes. We do not encounter movement or dynamism. And where there is no action, there cannot be interaction either. Like a scientist the artist makes painterly specimens from what is caught in his visual net; he uses painting to conserves a section of the world. …” (Hans-Joachim Müller, Freiburg 2005). But Fleck is not interested in straightforward representation. When he paints a mountain or a city it is the idea of a mountain or a city; in a sense a mountain becomes all mountains.

All this is primarily about a visual experience. With a distance things get clearer and change with increasing closeness to structural details. In this thematic field between estrangement and recognition Ralph Fleck’s art can be seen.

His art deals with the limited aspect of seeing, is about seeing as a sensual experience. He does not stint on the paint, he builds it up with thick undiluted paint.

The present collection includes the large-sized this year painting (110 x 330 cm) “Love Parade19/V”, which shows a colourful human crowd. Also large-sized is the painting “Centre Pompidou 25/VII.12”. It shows a sitting museum attendant at the same-named museum, who seems to watch over a small painting on a big white wall. The large-sized oil on canvas “Montparnasse 3/III” (200 x 200 cm) as well as two smaller paintings (Fassade 9 and 10/XII, 80 x 70 cm) from 2011, belong to Ralph Fleck’s cityscapes paintings. Similar to the photos of Gursky, Ralph Fleck’s paintings show the rasterized uniformity of concrete facades with their many windows, which seem to reveal their coloured inner life. But also simple things of every day life, like a pile of books (“Stapel 28/V (Paris)”), belong to his oeuvre. Well known are his book still-lifes, which appear as an arrangement of lines and squares as in his painting “Stilleben 14/IV” from 2009. The zoom optics of an aerial perspective (“Rastro 8/VI” from 2009 or “Feira 18/VIII” from 2005) inspires Fleck. Like hardly any other painter, Ralph Fleck has a lot of pictures dedicated to the “City”. The metropolises are shown as structures of buildings with the streets as blood vessels (“Stadtbild 3/III (Roma)” and “Stadtbild 25/VI (Paris)”.

Ralph Fleck is attracted by the colours and all is treated as still life. And even the still-life of an oyster and the chosen technique with undiluted paint is about seeing as a sensual experience.