Roland Ladwig
Still Life with Flowers
1988

About the Item

In the flyleaf of the catalog published on the occasion of his exhibition in the Gallery Pels-Leusden in Berlin in 1982, there is the following dedication: “For the very gifted Roland Ladwig, who does not find his equal in today’s Germany. On the occasion of the visit 15. V. 70 by O. Kokoschka.” This sentence not only expresses the artistic appreciation of Kokoschka for Ladwig, but can also be seen as a spiritual and stylistic positioning for an extraordinary artistic personality. While some early works, figurative works, as well as his Norwegian landscapes of the 60s and 70s still echo formal and substantive references to Edvard Munch, the works of recent decades have their starting point in the field of tension between the late work of a Lovis Corinth and Kokoschka’s works. Without ever losing sight of the many forms of contemporary art creation, he never saw the need to adapt himself to the prevailing trends and isms of the day nor to pay tribute to an often rather questionable zeitgeist. The spiritual homeland of his artistic concern is the Expressionism of the Classical Modern Art. The eruptive power and immediacy of his paintings would also hardly have been suitable for adaptation to contemporary fashions. Too haunting, too spontaneous, too passionate is the dynamic style of his painterly transcript, to be disciplined by a rationally controlled formal superstructure, on the other hand his sight was too sharp, his topographical transcript and formal determination of his artistic expression were too surgically precise for him to be satisfied in his body of work with arbitrariness of abstract and non-representational language of painting.

Creator:

Roland Ladwig (1935 - 2014)

Creation Year:

1988

Dimensions:

Height: 28.75 in (73 cm)Width: 23.63 in (60 cm)

Medium:

Canvas,Oil

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

1980-1989