MANFRED JURGENS

www.m-w-juergens.de

At the age of 3, I started to paint, as does every child. Yet I belong to those people who never can stop. When I was a child, I used to spend my holidays at my grandparents´ house near Dresden.

They encouraged my interest in painting by taking me to see the Dresden Art Galleries. At a later date, I would often spend whole days in front of selected paintings to learn the technique of the great old and new masters. Two artists fascinated me the most: Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and Otto Dix (1891-1969).

When I was young, I copied the paintings of the old masters so as to better understand their feelings when painting the pictures centuries earlier. Later, I painted in a more abstract way, because I found the precision disturbing. During the last thirty years, I have no longer been satisfied with flat and diluted shapes in my pictures. I need the detail to express my feelings. Working with portraits and human physiognomy fascinates me. Not the description of the surface, but what lies hidden beneath it is what interests me: The frailty of the human being, the factual portrayal of individual truth.

In my work I am trying to combine a contemporary view on life with the "New Functionalism" of the twentieth of the 20th century and the art of the Renaissance. To describe my art I use the notion of New Realism and recently, I have concentrated on portraits and still-lifes.

I can only set a functionalism, a powerful silent against today´s inflation of pictures. I believe that it is the attraction of the direct view which enables insights into the soul. When colour becomes not only skin, cloth, water and sky but also soul, then I have overcome the empty panel.

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