Untitled
by Daniel M Thurau
Lessons in paint
You know there are so called songwriters for songwriters, poets for poets and writers for writers. Daniel M Thurau is a painter for painters.
Influenced by German Expressionism, Thurau shaped a style of intense colours, which produce an artificially exaggerated reality with overreaching and sometimes apparently grotesque forms. By reacting to the non-figurative paintings by Albert Oehlen, the colour range of Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh and Frank Stella’s dense and bright compositions he developed his own form of expression. His mostly figurative work shows elements which are often referring to comic-like figures.
Often Thurau uses randomly picked material as a footing to execute his extraordinary art on. His work also reflects on the environment he is currently living in.
He produces intensive paintings, satiated with a overwhelming and strong will of expression provocatively direct in the treatment of themes spanning from love, death and sex to questions of humanity or the human condition itself. His latest works reflect on the life and death of England’s Boxing Legend Jem Mace, as well as the disparate social changes in Eastern Germany where Thurau has been born.
But beside all the literary we should never forget that he in every single work consolidates the essential components of painting in a very disciplined and concentrated way: The drawing, the composition, the colour and eventually the gesture or handwriting of the painterly execution. The motive on the other hand serves him as an artefact and as the original motivation for his painting.
Paul-Christian van Leyden
