Two artists, two generations, two artistic positions and yet there is a central approach in the works of Helge Leiberg and Sibylle Czichon that makes a double exhibition and an artistic dialog insightful, relevant and worth seeing.
Sculpture, paintings and drawings by the internationally renowned artist Helge Leiberg, whose works are represented in collections such as the Getty Museum L.A. USA, Würth Collection, Berlinische Galerie, and many others, and paintings by Sibylle Czichon, a graduate of the Düsseldorf Art Academy and scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation, will be shown in the upcoming exhibition entitled Body of work and address the role of the body in finding and formulating the respective creative universe.
”In the movement of man, he seeks man, he seeks himself.” Writes Dr. Dietrich Mahlow about Helge Leiberg in the exhibition catalog “Zwischen Sprung & Fall” in 1999 and indeed the artist Helge Leiberg, born in Dresden-Loschwitz in 1954, dedicates his work to the expression and immediacy of the human body. Both his ink drawings and works on canvas as well as his bronze sculptures appear as artfully curved characters whose form and dynamics reveal something about the simultaneous perfection and vulnerability of our existence.
Gestural lines form characteristic figures that wind around each other in wild dances, always in motion, in search of self and knowledge of the world and at the same time devoted to ecstasy. Helge Leiberg gives the choreography of human life an intensity of color and form that seems inexhaustible in its variations.
The gestural, cryptic and symbolic traces that Sibylle Czichon inscribes on the picture carriers also follow the artist’s own choreography, which defines her own physical presence as the basic ductus in her works.
Unlike Helge Leiberg, she completely dispenses with figurative references and stands in a broad tradition of abstract expressionism.
The body becomes an instrument of artistic expression, directed towards the canvas, equipped with tools of immediacy, self-assurance and transformation. The consequence of this kind of approach to her large-format works is also the dissolution of static physical states such as that of scale or the question of what the creation of a work of art postulates of an artist. “One consequence of this discovery is that I can enlarge my own body by using a very large canvas format. The other consequence is that I no longer paint what I see, but how I move. The traces of movement can be read as signs of movement. They have the character of a choreography.”
