What would it be like if names like Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Gauguin, Henri Mattisee and even a young Pablo Picasso were making art not in the 1880s but in the 2000s? I feel like Pascal Möehlmann makes a good starting reference point.
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| „Das Wallholz“, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 cm, 2007 |
He began gaining notoriety around the mid 2000s for both his shift of focus from abstracted conceptual art to his self titled style, which he named "Neue Schoenheit" (New Beauty) as well as his unique subject matter. "We [Möehlmann and fellow creator Daniel Herman] felt that it’s enough already with all the cynicism. That to focus on beauty, be it very much in the eye of the beholder, of course, and to speak through solid painting- and draughtsmanship, is enough challenge for any skilled artist to fill about 200 lifetimes. This founding of Neue Schoenheit has changed my work like doing what I’'ve done for about 20 years already, but changed to a higher gear. I’m still painting portraits, bodies and still lifes but I’'m much more focussed doing it."
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| „Sonntag“, oil on canvas, 95x95cm, 2007 |
Many of Möehlmann's influences include Rubens, Van Dyck, Caravaggio, Schiele, Vélàzquez, Singer-Sargent, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, El Greco, Titian and David, which I think is clearly represented in the artwork. He paints in alla prima, a style that is wet in wet paint. In this, an artist has less time and color to move around, not to mention he paints fast in many of his portraits, racing against a clock. One thing I especially love about Sonngtag in particular is the fact that some areas of the canvas are not painted white, but are just the background of the canvas poking through—reminescient of Cézanne's Large Bathers.
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| „Jupiter and Io“, detail, oil on canvas, lifesize, 2016 |
You can find more of Pascal Möehlmann's artwork at his Instagram
here or his website
here as well as the link to the In Rainbows interview
here.
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