JAN PETER THORBECKE
Prints and paintings

Since 2004 the musée départemental de l'Oise has acquired, through donations and purchases, an important ensemble of prints and woods by Jan Peter Thorbecke, which have added value to its collection of contemporary prints. The artist who was born in Leipzig in 1942, and lives between Darmstadt and Constance, was first famous for his paintings before dedicating himself to prints and producing in this field a very rich corpus that represents today more than 600 prints.

From painting to prints

The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with the artist and Roland Plumart, the French specialist of his printed work and the author of his catalogue raisonné, will include over 80 works, paintings, prints and watercolors, on the theme of perception and memory, from his workshop and the museum’s collection. In parallel to his painting activity, he started to print on metal in 1985, and in 1991, to produce prints on wood. His catalogue today has more than 650 prints. The public saw his engraved work through a traveling exhibition in 2002 (Brussels, Maubeuge, the museums of Darmstadt, Reutlingen, Schloss Moyland, Singen and Engen)



Illustration: Dry-point engraving (chalcography): Drei Frauen vor Alpenpanorama, Three women in the Alps, 1999, Kaltnadel auf kupfer, dry-point on copper, 12 proofs. Copyright: Wolfgang Fouhrmannek

A nervous writing in metal

In his prints on metal, Thorbecke has created a spontaneous, very free writing, with a nervous, worried and almost hesitant line, which recalls fugitive visions such as the ones that come up from the in-most depths of the memory, sometimes at the limits of abstraction. The source of inspiration – the photographs from the family albums, the trace of life gone by, erased – is the same in the engraved wood, from a different technical approach, close to sculpture. These surprisingly intense proofs recall the Primitivist experiments by the German Expressionist masters.

Fragments of the intimate life in painting

In his painting, Thorbecke developed, in a very fluid acrylic material, genre scenes, Interiors often without characters. True «subjects» of the painting, interpreted with irony by the desired discrepancy due to an exaggerated, suffocating decorative taste, these fragments of the intimate context are presented in a symphony of subtly orchestrated colors, carried by a great formal freedom, influenced by an avowed fascination with Bonnard and Matisse. This reference is always sensitive in the still lives in a more modest format, in the layout of the objects and the treatment by color alone of the light effects.

To see more illustrations, click on VERSION FRANCAISE at the top of this page