Peter Zaumseil

"Matchstick men - Woodcuts"

01.12.2001 - 31.01.2002

Woodcutting is a niche that certain artists have specialised in and is very far from modern art trends, from the period of the Young Wilds and Concept Art to the Post Modern period. For them the ability to reproduce is no longer important – eventually woodcutting was introduced in Europe in the 14th century as a way of duplicating holy images, and at the time of the Reformation it served to produce agitative posters. The Expressionists, at the beginning of the 20th century, rediscovered woodcutting as a medium of their expression. Dresden became the new home of woodcutting with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and his Brücke friends. The rough cuts, the sharp contours, the strong abstraction gave expression to people and landscapes in stirring tragedy and impressive clarity.  German Expressionism confronted us everywhere, not only in woodcuts, which flourished here as before, whilst with us it shrunk to a speciality by Max Grieshaber. Leipzig, with its University for Graphic and Book Art, was pointing the way and can today present many woodcutters: Wolfram Ebersbach, Karl Georg Hirsch, Rolf Kuhrt, Michael Müller and Frank Wahle. Peter Zaumseil received his artistic training (Special School for Painting/Graphic in Rudolfstadt) and development in the ex-GDR. He received his stimulus in Leipzig with the woodcutters based there. He found the technique very accommodating. Here he found the reduction of the form, which painting in this way did not offer him, the clarity of the gesture, the stylisation and witty exaggeration up to caricature. Body language, body gestures is the content of his themes. He thereby also goes back to "primitive" cultural forms, like his famous predecessors at the turn of the last century, such as Paul Gauguin, whose first trip to Tahiti was the decisive factor in the deliberately simplified woodcut.  Peter Zaumseil experiments a lot, has a lot of plans, bubbles over with creativity. Small colour pictures serve him as blueprints for the large woodcuts, soft, artistic, attractive, aphorisms, locking in the moment. Execution as a woodcut thus means reduction, abstraction, precision, another level of meaning is achieved through the largeness, the intensive work. The autonomous woodcut image comes into being. Zaumseil remains communicative in his work. He enjoys working with other artists, as in the printing of art books, but he also likes bringing his own personality so strongly into his work that the observer searches for the artist behind the art. The certainty, casual manner, indeed the insolence, with which a relatively young artist has discovered an ancient technique for himself and has worked on it full of ideas and with great pleasure with indifference towards art history and current art trends, gives rise to curiosity in the observer. Simple pictograms, well-known gestures, clear composition, assured use of colour, ancient experiences, which had already been gathered in the Stone Age in caves, face us in modern aluminium frames with a smile. And we are grateful to Peter Zaumseil for this smile and we love his rough matchstick men.

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