AN emotional time in his life and a heap of ash near his home in De Rust brought about a shift in artist Hermann Niebuhr’s creative process. With his latest exhibition opening in Stellenbosch this Saturday (April 9) he has moved away from the colourful oil paintings of his past, and has now created artworks with texture; in shades of black, white and grey, in an almost alchemistic manner – all made from ash, charcoal and lime.
Niebuhr, a Johannesburg-born artist, spoke to Die Hoorn in his studio, and passionately talked about his new direction in art and his latest exhibition. These artworks no longer speak to the dark, emotional time he was going through before he started creating them. Now, they are something very different: filled with life and thought-provoking.
“I’ve been making these beautiful bright paintings – almost Rothko-esque – and I just wasn’t in the mood for it anymore; my life was changing. When I found this pile of ash on the property next door, which I look after, I wondered if I could make something of the ash and coal – maybe use it as a way to create an image, as you do with charcoal. So I brought some back to the studio, crushed it down, incorporated some of the almost silver ash I found in my fireplace, and thought of a way to bind it,” he said.
Niebuhr started experimenting; sometimes incorporating wood glue to get the ash and charcoal to adhere to the canvas and obey his ideas. He mixed the ash and charcoal to create different shades of black and grey, added lime for lighter shades and highlights, and found that wood glue was the perfect medium to bind his ingredients together.
He took simple, everyday items such as pliers, a key or a lantern; and he took simple scenes such as light coming through a window or the night sky, and created new artworks one after the other. Some were small, and some were on a large scale.
“The first few pieces, like the skulls, I found to be a bit corny. But I needed to find out how these materials I chose behave. I had to start fixing them in layers onto the canvas. My studio became like one big laboratory.” The vigour and excitement with which Niebuhr explains his artworks is palpable, and infectious. There is an intensity in him, and in his artwork, that evokes many emotions.
He ads that although his studio was part laboratory, it also became in essence a therapy centre, and partly a church. “It’s an unusual space. What is a studio? It’s not a workshop, it’s not a house; it’s a place where things are made in a certain way. Then I came to terms with it all; I started making the singular images, but some started fitting together. Each work, with its own life force, started taking on its own meaning. It became like painting with light and dark in your hands, starting with a handful of darkness.”
He said that although some of the images are of rather ordinary objects, you look at them and see so much more. “There’s something that occurs when I see the object, and I’m just like; ‘that’s it!’. I don’t think of the meaning or what it signifies beforehand, I just see the next artwork. Eventually you stop seeing the picture, you stop seeing the material, and you start entering the image. So it becomes light, and you’re actually experiencing it as light. You’re no longer going ‘oh, so this is paint turned into this or that’. These works have a very energetic quality to them.”
For his exhibition at the University of Stellenbosch, that opens this weekend, there will also be something special waiting for art-lovers. There will be an aspect of performance art, connected to one of his larger pieces which will undergo a metamorphosis during the opening, but for now, he would prefer to keep that close to his chest.
• Niebuhr is an accomplished artist with a career spanning over 30 years. He has held exhibitions in some of South Africa’s most well-known galleries, as well as abroad, and has garnered many awards. Visit www.niebuhr.co.za to view more of his art, and to learn more about the man himself. (Deur Stefan Skapie Goosen)