Gertrude Elvira Lantenhammer | Visual Artist & Curator
Schlossplatz 3 | Germany - 97855 Triefenstein Homburg | T: +49 (0)9395 877888
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Abstract Site Plans and Archaic Heads
For the first time this exhibition of works by Gertrude Elvira Lantenhammer in the Galerie der BayernLB presents both of the artist's distinct
work groups. What connects the abstract site plans to the figurative head-images which seem to represent no individual yet appear to be personal?
Both represent an artistic act of creation preceeded by an intense examination of the dual nature, the two faces of reality. Places as well as
people can be, on the one hand, perceived neutrally, their appearance can be measured.
But at the same time both can stand in a highly personal relationship to those that concentrate upon them. Based on actual maps, which have already
turned the real place into a sign system, Gertrude Elvira Lantenhammer creates a second face for these places, mainly through the medium of colour.
The painter prepends pictures of heads, combined to a triptych, with archaicly reduced head-sculptures, the models she herself created for her
paintings. Thus, the transformation of two-dimensional image, interpreted in colour, is an immediate experience.
In both work groups this transformation of individual origins creates something new. Maybe the idea of the countenance as having subjectively
experienced? Or by second sight? things and conditions can do these creations justice. The countenance is a concentrate of experience, memory and
feeling, captured in the language of painting. It is the essence out of which the painter Gertrude Elvira Lantenhammer creates her images.
Jochen Meister, Munich 2007
Lagepl�ne / Site Plans
In her site plans Gertrude Elvira Lantenhammer reprocesses excerpts of maps and street plans into painted tableaus - sometimes in large format. Through an intensive study of topographical map works, historic and contemporary, the artist arrives at the formal basic structure, the essence of the place. She paints the intuitively found base-colour of the place - the radiance, the atmosphere, so to say, in superimposed layers of colour, condensed into large-format colour compositions as a subject with variations. In Gertrude Elvira Lantenhammer's abstract acrylic paintings on canvas, the main points of orientation for the viewer are the dominant colours.
K�pfe / Heads
Head sculptures and paintings are formed parallel to each other. In Lantenhammer's head sculpture different planes of imaging are given. On the one hand are the portraits, on the other hand the heads which the artist creates from memory, as the sum of visual experience and human observation, not depicting living people.
Gertrude Elvira Lantenhammer converts the constructed heads into painting: square pictures, in egg tempera on canvas, show the head with different expressions, in three variations.
