Since spring 2014, on the occasion of the two exhibitions Dear Artist, Draw Me! made by Dirk Rathke, his delicate ceiling work has been hovering above all the exhibition activity, often only discovered by visitors on a repeat visit to the exhibition. The artist has transferred the floor plan of the room as an ochre-golden line into the cove of the ceiling and rotated it by a few degrees. In addition to the fragility and beauty of the lines, which are amazingly straight despite the coving of the ceiling, the room is metaphorically mirrored in a small rotation.
No colleague has ever opposed and insisted that this subtle ceiling work be whitewashed for their own solo exhibition, even though at every exhibition Dirk Rathke is already present as a quasi 'invited' guest.
In addition to the aesthetically demanding request of his gallerist, it is also a matter of demonstrating what a commissioned mural could look like in a living space. How are you supposed to convey a mural if you can't imagine it? Dirk Rathke has realised many a mural in Berlin, Milan and Denver. If you move, you can replicate it! And it doesn't cost a fortune either.

His pictorial objects have been known for more than 20 years, they have often been shown in Germany and America in numerous solo and group exhibitions and at trade fairs.
Once you have seen them, they stick in your memory: Colour and form open up in parallel, even condition each other: it is not the 'mere' square that serves as the painting ground for the application of colour, but through the sculpturally worked relief of the stretcher frame and the cotton or canvas artistically stretched over it, colour and form merge. The side edges are free of paint. They thus emphasise the character of the painted picture, but at the same time underline the form, which alternately allows concave or convex partial forms to grow into the space, which pulls the picture sculpturally into the room or lets it nestle against the wall.
But where does the picture begin and end? What comes first? The colour or the form?

Dirk Rathke follows the same principle in the more recent group of works entitled Foldings, except that the volume has a different physicality. The variably large metal sheet is directed into the space at different depths by folding at different angles and orientations and can create dynamically staggered spatial planes. When changing the viewer's point of view, the monochrome work, painted with car paint, takes on a new character and yet remains the same. As with his painting: his work grows into the space and recedes again. It lives and breathes.

The fourth group of works is entitled Curves. They are free compositions, each bent from a metal rod, which extend into the space like a coloured drawing. The artist freely admits to having been inspired by his gallery colleague Ursula Sax.

When Dirk Rathke also integrates a tape mural into his new exhibition, he closes the loop to his first solo exhibition in 2013, when he already once measured the walls with a tape and even penetrated empty frames. Coming together: in the meantime, the signature style of his paintings has been enriched by several new groups of works that add form and colour.

coming together

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