Irmintraud Beck

Get in the mood for the joyous month of May

01.04.2005 - 30.05.2005

The cool capers of April does not get a look-in in the light-flooded FabrikGalerie. The walls are ablaze with a diversity of colors which really get the observer into the mood for the joyous month of May and spring as a whole. This diversity of colors is the result of twenty-seven acrylic paintings by the artist Irmin Beck, who now lives and works in Sönewitz, not far from Dresden. At the beginning of the 1960s, the native of Miltenberg studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Würzburg. Following her move to Berlin, the artist worked as an illustrator and as a trainee in a chemographic art institute. She continued her artistic training here, and also successfully completed her studies in biology. Irmintraud Beck has been working as an illustrator in the field of medicine and natural science since 1980. Upon her move to Dresden in 1985, her career took a different turn. In Dresden, she discovered the courage, the strength and the leisure to give in to her longing for artistic freedom and to realize on the canvass her very own fantasies – with no "ifs and buts" – away from anatomy and clinical case studies. Right from the beginning, complex spatial constellations and structured fantasies of plant life have been her subjects. The main focus of her exhibited works will be plants with flowers expressed in bright colors. These are not depictions of real subjects, but rather imaginative, partially fabulous images and "floral structures", as Irmin Beck herself describes her works. A tangle of buds, branches and stalks reminiscent of a primeval forest appears to take on the appearance of a system of nerve and blood vessels. Exotic flower gardens, lush underwater worlds, imaginary desert landscapes, tropical jungle idylls, fantastic yet also chaotic and also strictly-arranged tubular and capillary systems charmingly captivate the eye of the beholder. Irmin Beck’s works play with nature’s abundance of forms, and invent quiet, restful, unsentimental patterns in color tones which are also used in medical reference books to identify the human circulation system. Her art breathes the coldness of technical precision – a precision of extremely graphic sharpness on homogenous projection surfaces which take on a varnished appearance. You could describe this distanced manner of painting as a new form of a realism which is not unfamiliar with a romantic spirit. Irmintraud Beck does not use any sketches, preferring instead for the cosmos of her paintings to unfold like a living organism on the canvas. Inner and outer worlds merge: her art is a quiet, complete echo of herself: "the floating smile of a keen intelligence".

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