LECTURE MARK GISBOURNE
Sunday, 04.06. 17:00 | "Effect and affect in informal painting (the paintings of Christine Jackob-Marks)" Lecture of the internationally renowned art historian, curator, and author Mark Gisbourne (in English)

About the exhibition
The English word soil summarizes themes that characterize the entire creative path of Christine Jackob-Marks: the ground, the earth (world, planet), the cause; to soil: to pollute, contaminate, sully. The exhibition focuses on one of the painter's guiding genres, the landscape in transition from the 1980s to the current series of works. In particular, the assaulted, threatened landscape, where something is at stake, is representative of her exploration of the threats to the natural world that is our home and condition of life. In doing so, the artist demonstrates sensitivity to a special, contradictory beauty of nature, which unfolds incomparably fascinating, bizarre and imaginative color games not despite but precisely in processes of withering and decay. After all, isn't it the abysmal and the ugly that the actual igniting power for change and innovation lies in, while pure beauty only knows complacency? 

If one compares Christine Jackob-Marks' works of recent years with earlier works on nudes, landscapes, still lifes, and animal portraits, one can describe a turning away from representational depiction. Significantly, the painter does not understand this in any way as a turn to abstraction. Quite the contrary: anyone following her artistic development will find, especially in the landscape-related paintings, a progressive intensification of essential thoughts that accompany the entire oeuvre. The driving questions such as "where do I come from?", "why am I in the world?", "what is the unity of the cosmos?" testify to an incessant search for the essence of being and refuse any simple solution. If Dr. Peter Raue saw in Jackob-Marks' paintings the "loss of the innocence of the landscape", today in them the guilt and innocence of color, form and ductus as well as of the painting process itself seem to be put up for negotiation. This would be the logical culmination of the credo described by the artist: "destroy what is seen because it is not really what is seen; there is another reality behind it." 

A look at Jackob-Marks' path since her exhibition debut in Berlin in 1984 makes one aware that her artistic "keynote" has always remained the same through all variations of motifs and execution. Just as in Faust the search for what holds the world together at its core seems inseparable from the seduction of evil, so she repeatedly reaches out to doubt and the unfamiliar to advance her artistic work. "I am the painting," she says, leaving us to wonder if her artistic path itself is the answer.