Richard Oelze died in 1980 at the age of 80, living a secluded life in Posteholz in the Weserbergland region, yet his paintings continue to captivate us to this day. The Brockstedt Gallery has worked closely with him since the 1970s and is now presenting a museum-scale retrospective of his oil paintings and drawings.
Image gallery
Schriftzug "Ausstellung" in verschiedenen Sprachen
Born in 1900, the painter is regarded as one of the most original German artists of the 20th century. His enigmatic visual worlds oscillate between Surrealism, New Objectivity and a deeply personal form of observation of reality. In atmospherically dense landscapes and mysterious constellations of figures, scenes emerge that appear familiar whilst at the same time eluding any unambiguous interpretation.
Following his training at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Oelze came into contact with the international Surrealist movement – the group of artists centred around André Breton – whilst in Paris in the 1930s.
There he also met established artists such as Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, who became one of the greatest admirers of Oelze’s work. Ernst held Oelze’s meticulously detailed, nightmarish paintings in high regard and, according to reports, praised them as ‘the most exquisite dream paintings’. There were also strong parallels in terms of artistic techniques: Max Ernst’s development of decalcomania (a transfer technique in which pressed paint creates random, organic structures) had a profound influence on Oelze. He utilised similar principles to render psychological phenomena such as pareidolia (the recognition of faces and figures in abstract structures) to perfection on canvas.
This encounter proved formative for his artistic development. Nevertheless, Oelze developed a distinctive visual language that cannot be reduced to any single art-historical movement.
Among his best-known works is *Erwartung* (1935/36): a group of people, with their backs turned to the viewer, gaze spellbound at an undefined event in a gloomy landscape in the distance. The painting condenses that tension between anticipation, uncertainty and latent threat which characterises Oelze’s work.
His paintings do not tell self-contained stories. Rather, they open up psychological spaces in which memory, dream and reality intertwine. Landscapes become landscapes of the soul; figures become bearers of an elusive sense of anticipation. It is precisely this openness that continues to lend Oelze’s works an extraordinary presence to this day.
Richard Oelze’s work occupies a special place within German modernism. His paintings do not focus solely on the visible, but on what might lie hidden behind it.
These quiet, enigmatic images invite us to look more closely – and to make room for the unknown. Perhaps, in doing so, we are following in Rilke’s footsteps into our inner selves:
‘A dream is a fragment of life – …And say that life is a dream: that is not so; not a dream alone.’
