springzeit / GILLE sighard (painting, graphic, sculpture)

18 March - 05 May 2022

The FLOX Gallery in Dresden is dedicating its current solo show to the work of the Leipzig painter Sighard Gille. As a retrospective on the occasion of the artist's 80th birthday, which has been postponed several times for Corona's sake and is now finally possible, two exemplary focal points have been chosen from the artist's versatile and ambivalent oeuvre.

On the one hand, there is landscape; modelled nature rises from luminous colour material, emphatic, gestural and intensely coloured. The works were created live on location, mainly in Havelland, which runs through the Elbe. They are segments of pristine nature, arbitrarily accentuated and amplified by the artist's temperament, which at the same time is timeless and responsible, struggling for truthfulness in a distinctly painterly style. Thus Gille wants to "capture what is endangered and yet so wonderful".

On the other hand, excerpts from the series Clowns are shown. On large formats, highly reflected and charged with a provocative apocalyptic context, they can be read as formulas of contemporary human-world relations. They are exalted stocktakings of the status quo, wild caricatures and loud comments by a quiet observer, which narratively add up to episodes.

Despite the polarity of the natural and the artificial in landscape and clowns, both subjects are united by Gille's own emphasis, the drama of the formulation and an obvious relish for strong colours. This makes the exhibition "springzeit" a sensual event for the visitor and an exciting show of a lively and mobile oeuvre.

Moreover, "springzeit" combines two premieres: Gille's landscapes are shown together for the first time and the new series Clowns, which cites the idiosyncratically grotesque in Gille's work, has not yet been seen in public.

Sighard Gille belongs to the artist tribe of the FLOX Gallery. He was a master student of Bernhard Heisig at the German Academy of Arts in Berlin and taught at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig as a professor; formally, he belongs to the painting of the Leipzig School.