Rolf Gith Life and Work
While still at school, Rolf Gith took private drawing and painting lessons from Arie Goral and Eduard Hopf. From 1968 to 1974, he studied painting at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg under Hans Thiemann (a student of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky) and Rudolf Hausner (Vienna School, fantastic realism), as well as visual communication.
In 1971, the artist received the German National Academic Foundation scholarship for painting, which included study visits to Florence and Rome. Gith has been working as a painter, illustrator, and designer since 1974. He initially painted large-format nudes. His intricately crafted physiognomies were exhibited at the Kunsthaus Hamburg in 1984 as part of the exhibition “Hans Thiemann and his students.” Between 1990 and 2001, he taught at Mainz University of Applied Sciences, lectured at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and was a visiting professor at the University of the Arts in Bremen.
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The central themes of his work are light and color. Rolf Gith creates these paintings using a complex, old-master technique of layered painting in egg tempera and resin oil paint. This allows him to depict the essential characteristics of Gith’s painting, such as transparency and color depth. Working on one of these complex paintings, created using old-master techniques, can take up to a year.
Gith arranges small groups of objects, which he then greatly enlarges and transfers to the canvas as blow-ups. Gith penetrates the innermost core of the objects in his paintings, enhancing the sensual experience and thus the presence of the objects. The props in the pictures step out of their mundane roles and take on a magical significance.
This resulted in the creation of the “message of light and color” series between 1996 and 2008. This was followed by the second series, “sign of light,” which ran until 2013. Each of his series consists of canvas works measuring 150×150 cm.
From 2013 to 2016, Gith worked on his third series of works entitled “low light.” In these works, the artist deals with representations that are executed in completely reduced light.
From 2016 to 2018, the artist created his new cycle, “message of silence.” Here, the objects appear simpler and more everyday, yet at the same time flooded with light. Banal objects, such as plants in a water glass, are transformed into fantastical, abstract-looking compositions through extreme close-ups. Both series of works were presented in solo exhibitions in our exhibition spaces.
In 2020, the Museum Marburg is dedicating a major retrospective to him with the exhibition “message of painting.” You can watch the artist talk that took place as part of this exhibition on our website.
With his works, the artist ranks among the contemporary painters who are reviving the genre of still life in art. His works are in private and public collections.