Klaus Rinke
The multiple documenta- and Biennale participant Klaus Rinke (1939) fits the description of the ‚universal artist‘ like no other. He works in the fields of painting, performance, land art, sculpture and graphic art.
Internationally, his works have been presented in solo exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Rinke's works are now in many prestigious collections, such as the collection of the Städel Museums in Frankfurt and the collection of the Deutscher Bundestag in Berlin.
Klaus Rinke studied art at the Folkwang School in Essen in the late 1950s and subsequently enjoyed his first successes in Paris. He was a central figure in the Düsseldorf art scene around Joseph Beuys.
For 30 years (from 1974 to 2004), longer than almost any other artist, he taught as a professor at the renowned Düsseldorf Art Academy. Today he lives near Linz/Austria and maintains a studio in Los Angeles/California.
The drawing style in Rinke's paintings is unique. They appear as if Rinke had drawn them rather than painted them, which is why they are also called Drawn Paintings. Here, Rinke places hatchings close together and forms impenetrable entanglements.
Rinke works strongly conceptually. The theme of his works is the essence of the world as Rinke sees it: Body and gravity, space and time, process and action. The artist comments:
„In the crinkle scribble lies the whole world. You need imagination to recognize it, and then the ability to put it into the world. (...) That's what I often used to tell my students in the academy: you have to think anew, and then new art will come out.“
► Rinke's well-known series Hohes C (1991):
It consists of 6 large-format works. Using the artistic technique of lithography, Rinke explores here the interaction of forms and hatching. The forms are rough and stencil-like, while the hatchings inside are meticulously small and densely interwoven. Clarity meets chaos, calm meets restlessness. Rinke arrives at three different results, each striking and beautifully revealing his "drawn" style.
