Visiting artist Dirk Balke in his studio in Duesseldorf
"Artists are the mystics of the 21st century "
By Peter Joerdell for R2-Feuilleton
Photo: Balke
The stag, symbolic in a lot of Balkes’s paintings, also often surfaces in alienated form as a sculpture. Front: "Indian-Boy" and "Hedgehog".
Duesseldorf. Dirk Balke has always been painting, he started painting in oil at the early age of eight. And he stayed faithful to his medium. “I did not excel at school“, a grinning Balke confesses to R2inside, sitting between tinfoil-tubes of acrylic and oil-colours surrounded by mixing beakers and brushes at a rustic table in his studio in Duesseldorf. When aged 15, he started his apprenticeship as a display designer. “Studying fine arts was out of the question.“ He worked as a display designer for Peek & Cloppenburg for more than 20 years – and made quite a career of it. Next to his dayjob he always painted. “From 2001 onwards I studied graphic design and painted parallel to my job, in order to evolve in my skills.“ After four years at the private academy Rhine-Ruhr he started to consequently pursue his path as an artist, and installed his first studio in Essen.
Then the stroke of fate happened. In 2002 his brother was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. Balke donated half of his own liver in order to save his brother’s life: “And that in a situation when my job was very demanding and I really wanted to move on with my art.“ And the job really did demand its tribute: P & C assigned him to a new task in Vienna. Soon Balke became area manager for all of South East-Europe, which was quite a strain, yet also quite a chance. For four years, Balke lived as a commuter between Vienna and the Ruhr area. “Vienna is a fantastic city, with so many great museums.“ Additionally, the painter made international contacts there. Especially important to him are to the present day his connections to Austria, the Czech Republic and Slowakia, as well as to the international artist group ”Die neuen Milben“ (“The new mites”, which in German gives a pun concerning “The new wild ones”), which he co-founded in Vienna.
Wilhelm Tell: "Why does someone shoot at their kid with a crossbow?"
But someday, it became evident that he and his company, P & C, we’re going to walk separate ways. After “23 great years“ Balke dared a completely new start in his life in 2009 – as a freelance-artist. And successfully: He also confronted his own, difficult topics in life more consequently in his oeuvre. “My brother and the organ-transplant are now even more in the foreground.“ Many of Balke’s more recent works circle around the field of being wounded, are about faith and sincerity. An artist, who had been working mainly in the abstract before, now showed completely different sides. Absorbent gauze, cotton and compresses are not just present in painted form – they also surface in collage-like works.
“Apart from that, I’ve been thinking about my role as father. Have I always been a good dad myself?“ Like this, Wilhelm Tell became a topic. “That question never left me: How can a guy shoot at his own kid with a crossbow?“ His children live with Balke’s ex-wife in the US since 2003. Balke’s struggle with the subject manifests itself in the sculpture “Gessler“, a kind of mummy wrapped up in absorbant gauze (below which, as one could expect it from a former display designer, a shop window dummy is present). Pierced by a bolt from a crossbow, an apple rests atop the sculptures head. Since about a year, Balke is also working on sculptures. So the Indian boy Winnetou came into existence, tied to a stake, while his ashamed downward look was made possible by Balke’s manipulating the stature of the shop-window dummy in a radical way beneath the bandages.
Apart from the breaking points in his own life, Balke is busy thinking about the tectonic shifts in modern society. Nowadays everyone, he observes, “has to be such a super-great individual “. Casting shows, Twitter, web-communities – human kind, as Balke perceives it, suffocates in a cloud of communication without communicating really essential questions. “Everyone wants to be able to be still standing up, thus all people are staying in shallow waters. Only a few still learn how to swim.“
Balke’s further development as an artist and painter is something that one may definitely look forward to. While in the beginning mere compositions made of colour were in the foreground and there wasn’t a single painting bearing any title, more and more non-abstract figures started to appear over the years (some of them even re-curring manifold, such as the stag, which almost became a trademark of Balke’s work). And now, the paintings are also titled. It is remarkable, that actually the concrete, identifiable items “appeared“ from the whiteness of the mist dominating Balke’s work. Dirk Balke: “Somehow I have the feeling, that the representational emancipated itself from the abstract world of my works.“
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