GERDA LEPKE | Exhibition June 7 - July 12, 2021

Gerda Lepke, born in Jena in 1939, is a painter and graphic artist.
Nature, sky, landscapes and tangled branches are just as much a part of her oeuvre as human figures, couples and group images.
Lepke's watercolors, paintings and ink drawings always seem to be in motion, with brush strokes they splotch and speckle paint on canvases and exciting structures of colors and shapes emerge.
The artist works completely withdrawn from herself, all distraction is felt as ballast. Often there are the same motifs within a few days, in different light, in a changing color or a changed density of the color network.
Dense layers of color that build on one another and that she applies standing, the canvas lying on the floor or slightly tilted with a brush that has been specially extended for this process.
The urge for reduction had its first peak in the 1970s. Her expressive images of the sky are created in Krukow in Mecklenburg. The cloud images of the 1980s become denser and show three-dimensional volume and spatial depth. Lepke's landscapes also intensified during these years. Painted to the edge, as if what was painted continued beyond the picture's borders. Their stylistic peculiarity is to bring the picture objects up close in order to let them appear in the cutout on the pictures surface.