Picture "Buddenbrooks" (2008) (Unique piece) New
Picture "Buddenbrooks" (2008) (Unique piece) New
Quick info
unique piece | signed | dated | acrylic on canvas | unframed | size 120 x 160 cm
Detailed description
Picture "Buddenbrooks" (2008) (Unique piece)
Inspired by his work on films such as "Utz" (1992) and the film adaptation of the literary classic "Buddenbrooks" (2008), Armin Mueller-Stahl created entire graphic and painterly cycles that captured his impressions and experiences of character studies and filming. In doing so, he created a complete work of art. These "Notes of Emotions" also serve as a testimony to an intense balance to his acting work, and also as an artistic documentation of a process of work and creation.
The painting "Buddenbrooks" comes from this meticulous and comprehensive engagement with Thomas Mann's novel of the century and the intensive work required to portray the patriarch of the Lübeck merchant family. As with the script pages he painted, here too, the expressive brushstrokes combine with an abstractly reduced colour landscape and quick character sketches to create a complex depiction of the scene.
Acrylic on canvas, 2008, signed and dated. Unframed. Size stretched on stretcher frame 120 x 160 cm as shown.
About Armin Mueller-Stahl
He is one of the few German world stars, character actor and Hollywood star. Armin Mueller-Stahl, born in December 1930 in Tilsit, East Prussia (now Russia), is a multi-talented actor with a wide range of creative powers. In the past, only a few close people knew of his exceptional talent as a painter. But Armin Mueller-Stahl paints exactly how he plays: great!
Armin Mueller-Stahl's portraits are expressive images of people. He creates a pictorial existence for each character by reducing them to the essential features and abstracting them using partly expressive brushstrokes. In landscape painting, Armin Mueller-Stahl pushes abstraction even further. He concentrates on constellations of light and colours, which he interprets in a very virtuoso way. This is where his skilled eye of a meticulous observer, who for decades has approached his environment with curiosity and sympathy, becomes apparent.
Armin Mueller-Stahl is one of the artistic multiple talents of German cultural history such as Hermann Hesse, Ernst Barlach, Günter Grass and Oskar Kokoschka. The trained concert violinist is perhaps the most important living German actor. But nowadays, Armin Mueller-Stahl is also known to the expert public as a painter, graphic artist, sculptor and writer. Versatility is his philosophy of life: "For me, painting, writing, making music and acting all belong together."
At the age of seventy, he made his first and most spectacular appearances as a painter at the Babelsberg Film Museum, with 100 of his works. "All my life I have observed and transferred postures, I play and draw them" – and that for half a century! That is why the exhibitions in Potsdam and Schwerin revealed astonishing depictions of people and many biographical snapshots from the film and theatre industry.
Today the artist is over 90 years old and his artistic work (drawings, oil, acrylic or watercolour painting) is widely recognised, without any celebrity bonus.
Depiction of typical scenes from daily life in painting, whereby a distinction can be made between peasant, bourgeois and courtly genres.
The genre reached its peak and immense popularity in Dutch paintings of the 17th century. In the 18th century, especially in France, the courtly-galant painting became prominent while in Germany the bourgeois character was emphasised.
A one-of-a-kind or unique piece is a work of art that has been personally created by the artist. It exists only once due to the type of production (oil painting, watercolours, drawing, etc.).
In addition to the classic unique pieces, there exist the so-called "serial unique pieces". They present a series of works with the same colour, motif and technique, manually prepared by the same artist. The serial unique pieces are rooted in "serial art", a type of modern art, that aims to create an aesthetic effect through series, repetitions and variations of the same objects or themes or a system of constant and variable elements or principles.
In the history of arts, the starting point of this trend was the work "Les Meules" (1890/1891) by Claude Monet, in which for the first time a series was created that went beyond a mere group of works. The other artists, who addressed to the serial art, include Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian and above all Gerhard Richter.