Häusler Contemporary is proud to announce the exhibition Jürgen Partenheimer «Vasts Apart» [Hamburger Block]. This group of works was first presented at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1990 and was acquired for a private collection. Thirty years later, we are showing this extraordinary cycle in Switzerland for the first time.
A year earlier (1989), when Jürgen Partenheimer was working on the cycle of drawings and watercolors that the Kunsthalle Hamburg is now exhibiting in the room of master drawings, he had a clear concept: “visualizing creative thought”. Thus begins an article by Evelyn Preuss[1] from 1990 about «Vasts Apart», a group of works consisting of 11 watercolors and 34 drawings which Werner Hofmann, then director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, exhibited in order to show how independent and distinct Jürgen Partenheimer’s work is from that of Paul Klee, to whom he was often compared in the 1980s.
Writing about this group of works in the artist’s book for the exhibition, Werner Hofmann recognizes “that the form (drawing) is to be perceived as a process”, and he gives a convincing explanation for this insight. “The categories of Partenheimer’s designs become recognizable when we accept the interpretation that his works suggest: that it is possible to understand the process of the form taking shape as one of surveying and taking over the picture plane. But these arrangements have a finality that appears unobtrusively, not categorically, which is why it would be wrong to speak of completion. Not only is there still a reference back to the process of production, but this process interacts with the resulting placement through intent and energy; it controls this placement.”[2] The intent and energy of the watercolors and drawings refer in their entirety to those “areas of ordering” in which their contexts are explored and recognized even as the works are being created.“