Biographical note

Born in 1964 in Viersen (Germany), I attended several art schools since 1986 and studied under some leading post-War European artists – in Salzburg (Summer Academy 1986 by Prof. Corneille/Group CoBrA), in Münster (University of Fine Arts Münster, 1987-89, under Prof. Norbert Tadeusz), and in Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Art Academy, 1989-91, under Prof. Karin Rissa).  Since that time I have resided in Düsseldorf where I work as a fine arts painter and where my studio is located.

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“I am not an artist, but a painter,” is how Norbert Tadeusz, my tutor in Münster, once described his work.  And Gerhard Richter said about his oeuvre: “My pictures are smarter than I am.”  I feel a close affinity to both these views and approaches.  My paintings speak for themselves and I prefer not to philosophize about them (and, consequently, most of them don't have a title).

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To do something consistently every single day, conscious of one’s inability to have done it appropriately well enough and of the need to do it again better, more appropriately, and “truer” to one’s expressive intentions can be regarded as the driving force behind my creative activity and innate quest for constant improvement.

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I value nothing more than to constantly reinvent – to perpetually “re-write” – my paintings: to paint over what appears ill-conceived, to play with new possibilities, and to continually alter the canvas.  Thus, each painting is in the end only a visual suggestion, an idea, a more or less successful – and at some point abandoned – pictorial effort which will be resumed with the next painting.

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And so, I consider my work as an experi/mental field of possibilities on which – to invoke Vicente Aleixandre’s La Destruccion o el amor (“Destruction or Love”) – like nowhere else destruction appears possible, and indeed necessary, and where it represents not just an alternative and opponent to love but virtually its synonym.

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Today more than ever before painting, in my view, is simply one of the finest and most meaningful activities mankind has dreamed up.