Reiner Heidorn
Reiner Heidorn is a german neo-expressionist, lives in Germany next to Munich.
If you ask the Weilheim artist Reiner Heidorn about his understanding of himself as an artist, he will say: “Painting to me means literally pushing oil paint across the canvas, shaping it in such a way that, with or without figuration, the result is a harmonious pictorial whole that does not show an artist’s characteristic manner and, without any specific artist’s hand, covers the surface, the way a tree trunk is blanketed by the elements.” Heidorn’s work is characterized by a freedom in his approach that is perhaps only available to the self-taught.
An exploration of Heidorn’s work reveals that the Young Wild One among the Expressionists of Weilheim is, painting the way he does, following a dual path. On the one hand, we come across figurative and narrative pictorial spaces. Through their charged painting technique, the works sublimate a feeling of uncertainty, a profound sense of homelessness and change that is felt in today’s world. On the other hand, Heidorn is committed to the idea of the monochrome. His large-format works use deep blue, dark or petrol tones, strewn with gestural speckles in similar shades and, due to the specific painting technique, they retain a soft luster even in their final form. The artist has created autonomous color-field oils which give rise to moods that are dark and difficult to pin down.
Heidorn is a master at inventing structures within fuscous pictorial spaces that also assume the role of an associative and meditative space. In the figurative paintings as much as in the dark and informal color-field paintings, Reiner Heidorn reveals his personal sense for oil paints. Simply looking at them, these works convey something of which we, the viewers, can have no knowledge. Yet, once we have sensed it, we do not want to turn our eyes away. - Stefan Maria Mittendorf / Curator
