Blue hour

For our 20th exhibition at the Stern-Wywiol Galerie, we are showing works by Rebecca Partridge, Yves Rasch and Sibylle Waldhausen under the title "Blue Hour". The latter two, Yves Rasch and Sibylle Waldhausen, are well known to many of you, as they took part in our first two exhibitions in 2012. We are showing the British artist Rebecca Partridge for the first time, and I would like to extend a warm welcome to all three artists.
Our exhibition is entitled "Blue Hour". All of you know the wonderful light that appears after sunset and before nightfall. The artificial lights have already been switched on, but the sky is still luminous and shines in a magical, dark blue. It is a suspended state that belongs neither to day nor to night. It is a time that Wolfgang Koeppen described as "the hour of dreaming, a span of relative freedom, the moment of being free of day and night"
All three artists in our exhibition are concerned with this transition, this phase between day (rationality) and night (irrationality).
Rebecca Partridge paints landscapes that almost look like photographs and only turn out to be paintings on closer inspection. She finds her motifs from the real view of nature, but somehow they are still very general signs, for example for the term TREE or MOUNTAIN.
Yves Rasch's sculptures are also characterised by an indeterminacy, a floating quality. On the one hand, they are clearly recognisable as products of an artistic imagination. At the same time, they look like found objects, fossils or enlargements from nature.
Sibylle Waldhausen is interested in the human figure. She analyses patterns of movement and expressions of the body in the most precise observation of individual people. However, she does not portray them, but forms ARCHETYPES of the human from their individual characteristics. Again, an intermediate state, a hovering between the individual and the general, the particular and the typical.
However, the mood of our exhibition can also be characterised beyond the concept of the "Blue Hour".
Blue is the colour of longing, of freedom, of clarity, of wisdom. Think of the paintings of the Middle Ages, in which the precious blue colour was used exclusively for the cloak of the Mother of God. Think of the blue flower of Romanticism, which the young hero was supposed to find and recognise himself in. Think of blue as the colour of peace, for example in the UN flag or the European flag. Blue is the colour of constancy and loyalty, the British even know TRUE BLUE. Above all, however, blue is the colour of the sky and therefore a symbol of infinity and imagination.