5 minute read

Featured Artist: Elke Jungbluth

Elke Jungbluth paints ever since she could hold a brush… as a child, as a teenager and also after studying mathematics and architecture, which have influenced her first works. She followed her heart and decided to pursue the path of an artist, instead of that of an architect. She has remained faithful to her decision of doing so.

Through painting, she wants to experience new luck and new delight. Thus, she is consistently forced into her atelier in Cologne Altstadt-Nord.

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In her first works, she was fascinated by the manifestation of mathematical shapes and forms and architectural structures. Her works, however, slowly developed from Realism to the abstract.

Today, she does not simply portray the being, but to be, not the flower, but its flourishing nature, not the river, but its flow - everything is constantly in motion.

Red House in the Middle

Red House in the Middle

The energy, with which she portrays patterns, form and lines artistically, ensure a unique and repeatedly fresh ambiance. Through the combination of colour, independent shapes and dynamic curves, she lends her works a characteristic tone.

Through the traces of her personal artistic handwriting, her artworks demonstrate motion. Thereby, the artists’s character and vivacity are expressed.

Elke Jungbluth’s experimental experiences, following the shift of style from architectural themes and structure, to the present abstraction through colour and intuitive shapes, have accompanied the influence of time.

She wants to excite the beholder’s curiosity, awaken the pleasure felt through the feeling of nature, yearning for levity.

Spanish Village by the Sea

Spanish Village by the Sea

Art responds to time, in which it is created and reacts to challenges.

It may, however, also offer a conscious distraction from one’s surroundings.

For Elke Jungbluth, the time to express joy and delight through painting had matured. Through her works, she consciously sets a counterpoint, a kind of liberation from the trauma of catastrophes, war, hunger and suffering. Her art seems playful, conveys a sense of joy, lends an optimism to life and directly expresses the beauty of colour and shapes.

Her works intend to serve the development of the soul and emanate optimism.

They do not ask questions. Her colourful artworks portray the answer and the paths toward that, which is worthwhile living for- delightful moments - conveying an unacquainted positive aura.

The Fraud

The Fraud

Effortlessly, colour and shape combinations are spread over the canvas and set in a, from my point of view, distinctive balance and harmony.

Her works remind the beholder of one of the first abstract Aquarelles from Kandinsky from 1910, which was seen as the cradle of abstract painting for a prolonged period of time. Elke Jungbluth’s pieces are, however, more densely filled, enabling a sensation of depth, guided by a sense of sentimentality.

Following the theme of abstract expressionism and mirroring shapes, the artist leaves the choice of style open.

Her pieces are the result of artistic spontaneity.

Screams in Me

Screams in Me

The process of painting is the subject. The tension between colour and movement, abstraction, space and area can be clearly felt. Her works captivate the beholder to the extent of prohibiting his sight to rest. We move between lines and paths and rails, as well as figures, plants and buildings. She transforms cities and landscapes into rhythmical structures. Thereby, fantastical, dreamlike landscapes arise. Crowded, overlapping and consequent, colours demonstrating and portraying their limitless paths - exceeding the edge of the canvas - merge.

The vivacious, feisty impetus, explosiveness and the reflection of the expressionistic style, using powerful and lively colours, make her artwork particularly distinguishable. In my opinion, the evolution into abstractedness, portrays a resolute step Elke Jungbluth has made.

Her paintings have a characteristic rhythm. We are unable to detect a hierarchy in her works - everything seems equal. Emotion, inspiration and construction blend into each other through form-moulding, explosive painting techniques into admirable merriment.

Creation

Creation

In her studio, Elke Jungbluth creates mood and motion by unintentional means of music playing in the background, lending the art of painting a rhythm, tone and beat. This is then accompanied by colour, shape and form, pattern and composition to give birth to a new abstract piece.

Elke Jungbluth seizes painting as an unbound system by pursuing her ideas and inspiration coherently. Limits are vanquished, while she allows colours to run freely and idly, enabling their independence to bloom.

Her works reach into space. They search for contact with their surroundings and move between the abstract and composition (figuration).

Oh Happy Day

Oh Happy Day

Her last works show a radical reduction in form. From my point of view, they live from dynamics and colour.

As well in nature as in painting, colour takes the role of a powerful medium, that can convey aesthetic emotions.

The artist has developed a unique and unmistakeable talent for this purpose. With her pronounced sense for and knowledge of colour, she creates paintings for an optimistic future. She downright drives her colours to an always brighter radiancy. “It is delightful to live by giving and obtaining the joy of the beholder.”, is what orange, yellow, blue and green on her canvas mean to say.

The unconventionally inspired explosions of colour in her most recent pieces take up multiple phases to form.

Candy Park

Candy Park

An essential element is colour itself, that Elke Jungbluth uses, to even out with a scraper, stroke with a brush, or to simply let it drip and flow on the canvas; guided by the central motif and theme, walking into intersecting paths.

Remember how the artist Willem de Kooning once said: “Painting is that voiceless chapter, of which we may talk about endlessly.”

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