Jakobus Durstewitz

In his solo exhibition „Seltene Erden“, Jakobus Durstewitz expresses his usual settings of water, air, concrete and steel this time exclusively in special earth tones. Crushed stones and minerals, plant dyes, burnt bones.

The pigments, some of which are very rare, are applied to the canvas primed with Rügen chalk and bone glue. Durstewitz thus embarks on a journey into the depths of the matter of color - into a world of pigments that are older than modern industries and that have accompanied us humans ever since we began to capture our surroundings in color. For his palette, he uses gold ochre, lapis lazuli, Bohemian green earth or Snaefellsjoekull red - pigments from Iceland, Afghanistan, Cyprus, Chile and other remote places.

The use of these old, original dyes raises fundamental questions of cultural history: How can the essence of painting be described? Is artistic expressiveness rooted in the “souls” of the pigments rather than in the human “spirit”? Furthermore, his series of works allows us to reflect on the earth not only as a resource, but also as a medium of connection: Just like the desert winds of the Sahara, which carry earth particles and crystal pigments into the world in spring, the traces of nature also colonize Durstewitz's paintings. Like a kind of echo, they may make us reflect on the ground beneath our own feet.

Jakobus Durstewitz has lived in Hamburg since the early 1990s and was part of the ´Hamburger Schule´. Since the beginning, Durstewitz has been responsible for the artwork of the Dockville Festival and initiated the construction of the art city MS Artville. Today, Durstewitz lives in the Lüneburg Heath and, in addition to painting and music, also devotes himself to large-scale installations for theater and concert stages.