Patrick Lemke „I cannot close my eyes“
Patrick Lemke (born 1972 in Montreal, Canada) started his career as a painter at the University of Arts Berlin with Prof. Fritz Weigle. There he practised a black and white photo-realism. After having changed to the class of Prof. Markus Luepertz at the State Academy of Arts Duesseldorf, the young artist began with abstract, but colourful works. After having been deeply engaged with abstraction, Lemke, presently 34 years old, works again with realistic elements. Patrick Lemke has found his own style, which means a synthesis of both manners.
Aesthetically Lemke‘s works are strikingly comprehensible to a wide public; they are beautiful and picture-puzzles at the same time.
Lemke‘s topics are formed by his permanent reference to the context of art history. This has been defined by role models such as Albrecht Duerer or Claude Lorrain.
Patrick Lemke works on the concepts of personality and space in his own time, which he expresses in allegorical sceneries.
Patrick Lemke has cultivated a complex and extremely time-consuming technique, which means that some works take months to be finished. With various varnishes, partly even paints, Lemke sprays an abstract all-over onto grounded canvas.
From a distance - the height of a ladder - the painter drops turpentine onto the pictures spread flat across the floor. In this way the pigments of the paint are beginning to dissolve again and are taken up by the edges of the drops.
In order to make bigger drops appear on the canvas the artist has to climb up almost five meters. Upon this ground Lemke applies the real sceneries.
In some other works Lemke almost exclusively paints in oil colours thinned down by linseed or citrus oil, which he sprays upon the pictures as in “yellow excitement“ or “circus“. Here too, he developed the composition by means of drops of turpentine or painted drops from its abstract beginnings to its full coherence.
Into this neutral space of pure painting Lemke introduces lines or areas that serve as a stage for figures. Little boys in casual clothes or young men in suits or coats serve as benchmarks for dimension and orientation in the pictures.
Similar to Caspar David Friedrich, Lemke‘s figures are often back figures that involve the viewers more intensively and enable them to identify.
The figures seem to be in reflection on themselves and their chances in the world, they stand at the opening of stages in space that are concerned with our thoughts in a quotation like way.
Thus pieces of furniture and accessories appear as furnishings on the green stage of the “interior of melancholy“. They demonstrate how we express the concept of our personality through the choice of our objects within the framework of a concept of space.
Lemkes affectionate interest in his own generation becomes evident in most of his works. Lemke plays with excerpts and open edges of pictures, which makes his work appear infinitely wide in a surrealistic way.
Colmar Schulte-Goltz M.A., Curator of the Art – Room, Room for Young Art, Essen, 2006
Patrick Lemke
"Circus“, 140 x 180 cm, Varnish and oil on canvas, 2006