What Andreas Golder (b. 1979 in Yekaterinburg, Russia) is concerned with are the “eternal subjects of painting”—love, suffering, decay, blood and earth—the unending circle of human life. Freely and without the slightest reluctance he moves through the recent and more distant art history.

“I am not interested in revolution,” the artist who lives in Berlin says in a conversation. Instead he absorbs and reflects what generations of painters before him have created. Actually, painting—or even all art as such—is something like a comfortable cage, the artist says, a clearly delimited field with almost impenetrable boundaries, within which he can move and work most freely, however. This restriction, which Golder takes to refer more to content and to the recurring topics, on the other hand gives him many liberties and potentials of innovation at the formal level.

Seeing how this painter and sculptor handles visual material found in books or magazines, or his own memories of works that he saw in museums, galleries and other studios, one is reminded of the sampling technique known in the music scene. Sampling means to repeat compositions of other authors in full or in part for one’s own creations, putting well-known things into new frames of reference.

In the fall and winter of 2010-11, Andreas Golder, was ‘artist in residence’ at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing (China) where he exhibited the paintings that he worked on during this stay under the title “I Wanna Be Adored”.

In the conception of the works to be presented at his first solo show at Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne, he focused on paintings by Matisse, Manet and the exponents of abstract expressionism. Henri Matisse, important representative of classic modernism, stands for the attempt at reduction which he managed to realize in his late works in particular. What’s typical for his paintings is his fluid coloring and his intriguing lines just as much as the playful composition and the effortless handling of his subjects. The work of this French artist who is regarded as a great innovator in the history of modern art has been enthusiastically received and absorbed by subsequent generations of painters, thus it was not least the abstract expressionists who made reference to his stylistic advances.

For his “Schmerzensmann” (Man of Sorrows, 2011, oil on canvas, 160 cm x 150 cm), Andreas Golder analyzed the compositional structures of “Girl with Tulips (Jeanne Vaderin)”, a portrait drawing that Matisse created in 1910. At the same time, the young painter “sampled” conceptual techniques that were introduced into artistic practice by the abstract expressionists. After all, the title of his painting refers back to a type of image that has its origins in 12th-century Byzantine art, when Jesus was no longer shown as the glorious vanquisher of sin and death but as a suffering human with wounds openly displayed to whom the beholder is intended to establish an inner rapport.

Andreas Golder succeeds in relating images from our culture’s visual memory to his very personal artistic perspective, thus arriving at intricate new paintings. Often he borrows the titles for his idiosyncratic reinterpretations from recent works of pop music which provides a bridge between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.

Portrait painting is another subject that Golder has been intensively concerned with for some time now. Part of this series are also self-portraits in the broadest sense, reflecting—like “selbst im alter mit gelungenem spätwerk” (Self in Old Age with Successful Late Work, 2011, oil on canvas, 300 cm x 200 cm)—his own role as an artist, its basis in tradition, and art as such.

The exhibition in Lucerne has the title “Retrospective 2011.7 – 2011.8” and, according to Golder, does not only give an overview of his most recent work but is in fact a retrospective survey of the domain of painting as such, in which the eternal themes resurface to find new forms. He metamorphoses the gallery’s white cube and stages his work in an emotionally charged, darkened room with brown carpets and dusky pink walls.

Text: Karin Seiz
Translation: Werner Richter