Max Uhlig: Vignes - Paysages de Provence

20.05. - 01.07.2017

Max Uhlig: Vignes - Paysages de Provence Max Uhlig (*06/23/1937) is standing in front of a canvas that measures almost twice his own width, with the striking silhouette of Mont Ventoux towering in front of him - this is how a photo shows the artist in the early 1990s. At the turn of the year 1990/91, Uhlig traveled to southern France for the first time. The area near Mont Ventoux was to influence his work for decades. For the artist, Provence was the first non-German landscape to influence his life and work. Whereas initially it was his native city of Dresden, the seaside areas of Mecklenburg and the barren Ore Mountains, he now devoted himself to the region in southeastern France. Uhlig tries to see and depict the elemental aspects of a landscape in a detail. In doing so, he is attracted not only by the distant, but also by the close view. Thus, for the area around his studio house in Faucon, he saw the ubiquitous vines as a characteristic element. He studied them for years, in the classical sense of plein air painting, at different times of the year and day. Here, as with the first open-air painters some 150 years ago, light and, associated with it, color play an important role. Already with the Impressionists, the object itself receded into the background; Uhlig further increases this limit of definability. The dynamic brushstroke emphasizes the interplay between line and form. The lines bundle and condense, circumscribe and model the space on the surface. Uhlig's watercolors, pastels, and oil paintings are represented nationally and internationally in numerous museums and public collections.

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