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Christopher Lehmpfuhl believes that color has to be felt.
Their consistency, their temperature, their heaviness.
And so the Berlin painter draws his oil paint from the full, applies it directly from the bucket onto the canvas with his hands.
For him, the haptic experience of the material is part of the creative process.
Only nature can provide other indispensable sensory impressions, because Lehmpfuhl is an outdoor painter par excellence.
It doesn't bother him if a downpour hits him or if sand and small flies stick to the layers of paint, if there is wind force nine or temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius.
On the contrary: the wilder the environment, the stronger the art that was wrested from it.
“I have to counter the forces of nature”, says the artist.
“Borderline experiences are very important for the pictures I take.
When I experience the forces of nature with all of my senses, I can implement them best. "
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Lehmpfuhl is an extreme painter who does his work with great physical effort and who needs painting like an athlete needs his daily training.
His works are breaking new ground, they cannot be stopped.
This art arises without a preliminary drawing, out of the moment, and passes on concentrated sensory impressions to the viewer.
But that's not the only reason why Lehmpfuhl's work absolutely wants to be experienced in the original: The reproduction also swallows the characteristic ups and downs of its impasto, i.e. thickly applied surface.
At Gottorf Castle in Schleswig there is now the opportunity to see around 150 works from all of the artist's creative phases.
The retrospective “Farbrausch” curated by Ingo Borges makes it clear that Lehmpfuhl really models his paintings.
He layers the paint so thickly on the canvas that reliefs are created - from voluminous hills of paint that bulge towards the viewer and valleys of color from which the primer sometimes even shimmers.
The earliest paintings fit in a wine box
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The color-laden canvases, which are a maximum of 180 by 240 centimeters in size, weigh up to 50 kilos.
But the exhibition also tells of the small-format beginnings of the painter, born in Berlin in 1972, who studied in the class of Klaus Fußmann at the Berlin University of the Arts in the 1990s and became his master's student.
"Many pictures show where Lehmpfuhl artistically comes from," says curator Borges, referring to Fußmann as the most important mentor: "The ability to fully immerse oneself in the landscape is something that teachers and students have in common." The earliest paintings date from their student days and fit in a wine box.
"At that time I still painted the classic way with a brush," says the artist, "but the impasto has always been in my nature."
The early work presented Lehmpfuhl as an open-air painter of the urban landscape.
Facades, window views, firewalls and construction sites already show the interest in the architectural facets of his hometown, the constant transformation of which he later examined in more detail in the extensive picture cycle “Berlin Neue Mitte”.
Two paintings of the Berlin Schlossplatz panorama
Source: VG Bild Kunst
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In the Gottorfer Reithalle, the eight-part, 14-meter-wide monumental work “Schlossplatz-Panorama” from 2015 can be seen from this complex.
The painter kept looking for new locations in the historic center of the city in order to capture the castle, which was rebuilt as the Humboldt Forum, and its surroundings from different perspectives during the construction period.
Construction cranes structure the image areas, streets and waterways direct the view in different directions, where other buildings such as the cathedral or the television tower appear.
The artist took Heligoland by storm
The panorama is framed in the show by landscape pictures that were created on Lehmpfuhl's numerous painting trips.
The artist, who has been a member of the North German Realists since 2003 and who values pure and clear light in the north, also found his motifs in Schleswig-Holstein.
Among other things, he painted in Emil Nolde's garden in Seebüll and on the offshore island of Helgoland, which he literally conquered by storm: in front of his trembling canvas, he defied the untamed forces of nature on the red rocks.
The show also shows some documentaries.
They follow the traveler who transports his heavy paint buckets on a hand truck to the most inhospitable and picturesque areas of the world.
The original exactly matches the lighting mood in Tuscany
Source: Florian Selig / VG Bild Kunst
His favorite trip took him to Iceland, where he spent two weeks researching smells, noises and color tones at primeval crater edges, in front of waterfalls and next to steaming springs: "The island trains the eye for what the landscape originally made up," says Lehmpfuhl.
How sensitively the painter can react to the prevailing atmosphere and convey it to the viewer is also shown by the Tuscany paintings, on which golden light pours over the green landscape.
“Basically, it's the light that interests me.
I decided to develop a contemporary form of impressionism, ”explains the artist.
Some works convey deep religiosity
Like the German impressionist Lovis Corinth, Lehmpfuhl often paints in the mountains and deals with the change in light over the course of the day and year. His parents owned a holiday home in Styria, so the alpine mountains became a second home for the passionate mountaineer. In addition to monumental mountain portraits, such as the “Glockner Duet” from 2013, he also created smaller works that capture starry mountain nights. The painting “Mondnacht 2”, for example, “says a lot about Lehmpfuhl's receptivity to the powerful beauty of nature, but it also conveys his deep religiosity,” explains the curator.
The painter, who also masterfully captured the many shades of snow in his mountain landscapes, used “Neue Heimat. A tribute to my parents “just black and white color. In order to come to terms with the death of both parents in autumn 2018, he created around 100 paintings, using old and younger family photos as templates. Lithographs are also part of this cycle - which was created in the studio for a change - which retells 80 years of family history.
While printmaking remained only a marginal area of his work, watercolor occupies a special position that Lehmpfuhl expands daily during the pandemic months: “For me, watercolor is the imperial technique,” says the painter, “because mistakes can no longer be corrected . “The retrospective in Schleswig presents a large selection of these delicate and beautiful works, which take up all of the themes typical of the plein air painter.
Watercolors by Christopher Lehmpfuhl can also be seen in Hamburg at the moment: the Felix Jud bookstore is showing the “Urban Perspectives” exhibition until April 12th.
"Color rush.
Christopher Lehmpfuhl ”.
Until October 17th at Gottorf Castle in Schleswig, specific time slots are to be booked, further information at schloss-gottorf.de.