In these last days of March, the Hamburg drizzle fills the air with a damp haze and colors the city grey. Under these conditions, no artist ventures out to meet up with colleagues on the Alster or Elbe to paint in the open air. Tobias Duwe, Lars Möller and Till Warwas are no exception. If there is no light, nothing can be done artistically, says Möller. Anyone who looks at his paintings of water surfaces and cloud formations understands this immediately: behind every wave rolling onto the beach and every cumulus formation lies a mysterious glow, as if the picture had its own light source.
Because of the weather, Möller works in his studio in Langenhorn Nord. One of his large views of the Elbe is still on the easel here before it will soon be moving to the Jenisch Haus along with many other paintings. There the three painters are setting up the exhibition “Elbwärts” together, in which over 100 paintings and watercolors can be seen from April 3rd, around 35 works by each. The common theme is Hamburg, the Elbe metropolis in all its facets. Some motifs were interesting for all three artists and can now be viewed in comparison: the view to the south over the river, the forest of harbor cranes on the opposite bank, or the green hills in Jenisch Park.
What Hamburg’s Duwe and Möller and Bremen’s Warwas have in common is a conception of art that always remains committed to representationalism. The painters belong to the artist group Norddeutsche Realisten, whose 15 members have been painting outdoors for 30 years, i.e. “en plein air”. As part of the symposia, which take place once or twice a year, the group meets to capture landscapes or cityscapes on the North Sea or Baltic Sea, in Scandinavia, France, in the Rheingau or in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Bremen. The first meeting was launched in 1989 by the painter and New Realist Nikolaus Störtenbecker (1940–2022) to take a stand against abstraction, which was overwhelming at the time – and to bring like-minded, professional painters together for mutual inspiration. The association stands in the tradition of plein airism of the 19th century and thus of the artist colonies of Barbizon, Worpswede and Skagen.
But North German Realism is not a school that produces a common style, but a loose association of individualists. Lars Möller has been with us since 1998: “I got in there through my professor Erhard Göttlicher. He asked if I wouldn’t like to join a group of artists like that,” says the graduate of the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, who was born in 1968: “You help each other. If you look at the same picture for five hours, you become a little blind. If a colleague then comes up with suggestions, that’s good.” Outside of the symposia, Möller has also met with Duwe and Warwas several times to paint together in the open air – especially last summer and autumn, when most of the pictures for the show in the Jenisch Haus were created . A highlight was the visit to the Hamburg television tower; a painting by Till Warwas shows the grandiose view over the Alster to the hazy horizon.
However, the artists usually pursue their personal motif preferences on their own. Duwe, who was born in Bad Oldesloe in 1961 and studied in Hamburg with Almut Heise and Tom Knoth, focused the exhibition particularly strongly on the “Elbe”. One of his dynamic paintings shows the river and the beach near Övelgönne, for another Elbe portrait he chose the view over the Baumwall elevated railway station to the general cargo ship “Cap San Diego” and the Elbphilharmonie.
The Hamburg pictures by Warwas, born in 1962, appear more harmonious and calmer. Among other things, his carefully composed view of the mouth of the Alster with Michaelis Church can be seen in the museum, as is the Arcadian, spring-green picture “Das Bachtal im Jenischpark”. In addition to the large oil paintings with a focus on water and sky, Möller also shows small-format watercolors with city views.
Other works by the trio were created, for example, in Blankenese and Teufelsbrück, in the city center and on the Outer Alster, in Ottensen and in the Speicherstadt. Uncertainties as to which pictures come from whom should not arise when walking through the show: “Duwe is very colorful and Warwas always stays close to the motif in terms of colour. I tend to move in the gray area myself,” explains Möller. While all three artists transform visible reality into atmospheric images and transport moods, Möller wants to go even further and create timeless situations: “I want to paint images that work now or in 100 years – and that would have worked 100 years ago.” The seascape is particularly suitable for this, because the sea has “timelessness par excellence”.
Open-air painting accommodates the idealizing approach: “If I stand in front of the motif for up to eight hours, I have a lot of information and impressions that I can compose for myself,” says Möller. Over the long period of time, the light, the mood and the constellations in the landscape changed, “but I pick out a best-of of all the changes. A plein-air picture is a time collage”. The paintings of the North German Realists are created using the so-called alla prima technique. This wet-on-wet style of painting, in which the paint is repeatedly painted while it is still wet, is particularly suitable for spontaneous, spirited work. Masters of this art included the Swedish painter Anders Zorn (1860–1920) and the German impressionist Lovis Corinth (1858–1925). Both are among the role models of the artist group.
When the plein-air painters go out, they carry not only a rucksack with tubes of paint, brushes and turpentine, but also a few canvases and their suitcase easels, which can be opened in a few simple steps. A maximum of two images are created per day. On the first light layer of paint, the imprimatur, Möller makes a rough, linear preliminary drawing in Van Dyck brown. In the next step he paints brown shadows, only then are the colors added. Duwe also sets preparatory lines, which he immediately follows with the colors. Warwas, meanwhile, starts with flat backgrounds, which he gradually develops. But technology and composition are only half the battle: “You can only paint a picture if you have an idea of what you want to show,” says Möller. Assuming the right light.
