Manfred Riedl

"Landscapes"

01.08.2001 - 30.09.2001

Manfred Riedl's path of artistic creativity began at the age of 14 with a textile draughtsman apprenticeship in Auerbach in Vogtland, then followed attendance at art school in Plauen with subsequent employment as a designer in Plauen's leading industry. From 1952 to 1957 Riedl studied a degree in painting at the Kunsthochschule für bildende Künste (University for fine arts) in Dresden with Professors Fraaß and Bergander. From 1957 he was a member of the association of fine artists of the former GDR. He worked as a freelance artist and exhibited his works in many Saxon towns. Numerous distinctions, amongst others, the art prize of the District of Karl-Marx-Stadt were bestowed upon him. As a university lecturer he demonstrated his artistic capabilities at the Fachhochschule für angewandte Kunst (Advanced technical college for applied art) at Schneeberg. His creativity is (all-) pervasive. Manfred Riedl, born 1924, died on the 3rd June 1999 shortly before the completion of his 75th year in his home and workshop in Auerbach in Vogtland. What is exceptional and remarkable is the artistic development of Manfred Riedl; that already after only half a decade, after the completion of his university degree, he found his own unmistakable trademark style, which he persistently built upon and cultivated. From the outset his main theme was the countryside of his Vogtländisch homeland and of the adjacent ore-enriched mountains, with which he felt a particular affinity right up until the end of his life. Manfred Riedl roamed the wooded heights during all seasons; when the snow began to melt or even during the outbreak of the colder weather periods, until he found the most interesting views of the valleys and villages or exciting vistas on the ridges, worthy of a picture. Without sketching, he recorded his motifs, which he perceived and experienced with artistic eyes, simply on small or medium-sized format surfaces. In this way he endeavoured to achieve each form and colour association through a simplification of the forms to the geometrically effective surfaces and through a limited pallet, which facilitated a very expressive unified picture. Curved and partially spiral shaped flowing field definitions, paths or streets guide the observer's eyes deeper into the picture. Bushes, trees, buildings, posts or chimneys, depicted as stereoscopic image elements or accents, allow us to experience the breadth and depth of the countryside. Sparse or wooded slopes in their precipitous or ascending flow of lines frame the picture composition. The preferred colour pairing is blue or green with orange or umber with the occasional red accents. In addition mottled white makes an appearance, which is used to lighten up and break the colours. Oil painting with a pasty colour application combined great painting with the distinctiveness of the artist, to construct the motifs from the contrasting forms and colourful surfaces. The magnificent painting methods had logically led him to watercolours. His loose, animated and certain brushwork as well as superiority in the picture style is admirable. Evidence of this bond and love of nature are the richly coloured watercolours of flowers and plants, which are exhibited in the FabrikGalerie. One will discover and recognise when observing the pictures, how he traced the shapes and colours, and indeed how he painted, levelled out and dabbed them in their contrasting ebullience on the picture surfaces, and consequently how he guides us to their fullness, richness and splendour, displayed before our eyes. Manfred Riedl possessed his own vocabulary of personally gathered design resources, an individual form and colour canon as well as unique capabilities and skills, enabling him to creatively circumvent the art form, and through this, to consistently unveil ever new compositional variations. He regarded his own pictures as a type of message, to reveal the world in all its colourful poetry to his fellow man. For him the source of power was nature in its own unique diversity, and in its continual change as an indispensable, aesthetic-artistic experience. Riedl was deeply fulfilled by his mission, to look sensitively with wide-open eyes, to take pleasure in nature and to discover rare moments of fascinatingly unique ambience and to paint these with his personal sense of colour.

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