Artist
Henri Michaux
Artist
Part of events on ArtRabbit in: Berlin
The French writer, painter and draftsman Henri Michaux is regarded as an exceptional artist who succeeded in independently producing an independent poetic and an artistic oeuvre. In poetry as well as in drawing and painting, Michaux sought out forms of play to record his inner experience and to advance to unknown experiences. His literary as well as his artistic work are characterized by an unconditional will to be independent of schools and styles, by a rebellion against any form of convention. The restless travels of the young Michaux, the renunciation of a fixed abode and material comfort, the conscious confrontation with the foreignness of distant countries as well as with experimentation with drugs testify to his demanding approach to his own existence. Writing poems could only partially satisfy this desire; drawing and painting were to give expression to the inner experience that eludes language. Michaux sought an adequate expression for this in exaggeratedly quickly thrown down notations, which leave all conscious ability behind. In his ink drawings Michaux takes up scriptural elements and calligraphic signs that emerge seismographically from inner movements. The systems of word-language and sign-language interpenetrate each other. For all their tendency towards abstraction, his pictures nevertheless remain rooted in representationalism. The intention is not to escape the world, but to expand it through a change of consciousness. Galerie Georg Nothelfer showed Michaux for the first time in 1994 in a solo exhibition.
