MICHAEL VAN OFEN

Michael van Ofen discovered painting at a time when its death was predicted, but in fact never occurred. With portraits, still lifes, interiors, landscapes, architecture he chooses subjects that were generally declined in the modern age. Van Ofen finds his sources in the 19^th century: In addition to old masters as Jacques Louis David, Anton von Werner, Paul Hippolyte Delaroche or Emile Jean Horace Vernet he refers to historical tableaus of less known painters that he reinvents in precisely balanced compositions and in reducing paintings on few brush strokes. For van Ofen producing a painting means a careful, permanent exercising of the painting process itself: A delicate coordination of the brushwork, an elaborate setting of colour and light. The preceding analysis and dissolution of the same motive in several works serve him to prove and exercise the full range of pictorial possibilities. While painting, the figurative details decrease more and more in favour of a visualisation of single symbolic representation. In suspense between abstraction and figuration some colour parts get rid of their function to illustrate. But especially when looking at the paintings from a distance the observer gets an idea of a situation, atmosphere, a person or known motive.