1 October to 31 October 2005
On the occasion of the 60th birthday of Egon Schrick in 1995, Galerie Querformat participated in a comprehensive retrospective of his work. On the occasion of his 70th birthday, Galerie corridor 23 exhibited a section of the work of the artist living in Berlin-Schöneberg. The focus was on the character drawings of the last few years and the landscape drawings with which Egon Schrick has been working intensively since 1998.
Egon Schrick began to paint in 1960, during his architectural studies. In 1977, he finally abandoned his work as an architect. In the same year, he began his performances, which he has performed to date, among others. in Berlin, Moscow and Warsaw. Schrick's drawings are closely interwoven with the performances. Drawing is an elementary component of the actions. And the drawings, executed with black ink and chalk, emerge from a spontaneous, actionistic process of creation and often show violent movements.
Already in the course of the 1960s, Egon Schrick's drawings are increasingly focused on the human figure. The starting point of many pictures are personal experiences, childhood memories and relationships. The depiction of the figures is expressive, sometimes grotesque. The central theme is the relationship between rigid social structures and individual needs, of power and impotence, which can lead to anxiety and aggression, but also to lust and ecstasy. The drawings move between the extremes, they show free-floating and interlaced figures, gestures that vary between pleasure and suffering.
Since the 1980s, Egon Schrick has increasingly been dealing with political issues, the Nazi past and the global wars and genocides of the present. Refugee streams, scattered corpses, and suffering figures are at the center of these drawings. The pictures show the shattering existential consequences of the violent power exercised by totalitarian worldviews. In the works of the nineties, the space surrounding the figures, which Schrick had merely indicated in earlier works, gained in importance. In 1998 he became an independent motif. Since then, numerous, sometimes large-format landscapes have been created. They show empty, inhospitable regions dominated by dramatic moods. Rays of pointed poles, reminiscent of civilization relics or tree skeletons, and scattered figures reinforce the impression of destruction and loneliness in these images. These fictitious landscapes also vary between extremes, between light and darkness, hope and destruction.
Schrick's drawings often look tragic or gloomy; on closer inspection one discovers their various nuances, such as the comic overdrawing of figures or the poetic modulation of a landscape. His image worlds are always of great urgency.
