Jochen Mühlenbrink

The artist, whose paintings can already be found in renowned international and German collections, often works with a serial approach. “Asphalt”, his most recent series, shows dense, through their leaves and foliage almost unfathomable woods. As in his earlier works, human beings are nowhere to be seen, and yet: they seem all the more present, in their absence, perhaps they are the paintings’ real theme. Like his earlier series, they resonate a sense of silence, loneliness and melancholy. Now and again interrupted by something unsettling – a passing train – that causes a moment of commotion. Mühlenbrink’s paintings are snapshots of the artist’s subjective impressions. Their initial tranquility often turns out to be tarnished. Disconcertion and ambivalence emerge – between the sublime and banality, beauty and ugliness. Like in the traces of consumption, found as vividly colored garbage strewn across the street (“Malheur”) or in the absurdity of human’s intervention with the environment, culminating in a washing line hanging in the woods.

“Loud gestures or an ironically distanced stance are avoided. The painter doesn’t struggle with his artistic self-conception, instead he dedicates himself completely to the act of painting. His is not a path of destruction or negation. Instead, he works in the conscious tradition of painting and so it is not surprising to discover analogies, for example to the romantic allure of Claude Lorrain’s landscapes or to atmospheric scenes like William Turner’s paintings of light – light that opens into the continuity of space and seems to make temporality disappear. Similarly, Jochen Mühlenbrink forms natural and light spaces emanating from his imagination, based on a conglomerate of related, found situations, which evoke the traces of urbanity. They reveal the contrasting signs of everyday civilization in a human environment and nevertheless picture a quiet, Sunday world.“ (Isabel Meixner, Karlsruhe, in the catalog Jochen Mühlenbrink “Asphalt” Freiburg 2008)

Jochen Mühlenbrink studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie under Markus Lüpertz until 2006. His painting have been on show in numerous exhibitions, for example in a solo exhibition at Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt am Main (catalog), at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik in Bonn, in the KIT/Kunst im Tunnel, (Projektraum der Kunsthalle Düsseldorf), at the NRW Forum für Kultur und Wirtschaft in Düsseldorf, in the Museum Baden in Solingen, at the Kunstverein Reutlingen and in the Graphikmuseum Pablo Picasso in Münster.