Zwiegespräch am Karlsplatz Painting

I started painting in the early 1980s, unaware that I was developing on my own in Canada a Neo-Expressionist idiom that can be seen in retrospect as very much in tune with the cutting-edge new painting emerging internationally at that time in Germany (A. R. Penck and the Neue Wilden) and Italy (Francesco Clemente and the Transavanguardia). I was actually drawing inspiration from the same precedents : the CoBrA movement of Appel, Alechinsky and Corneille, which I was collecting as a gallerist in Montreal, and alongside whose work mine was displayed in Belgium whilst I was based there at the turn of the century. I also became more aware of my kinship with Schiele, Klee and Die Brücke when I was in Vienna in 1986 and Arnulf Rainer highly praised my work. This being said, it straddles the divide between figurative and abstract Expressionism, as I have always painted and drawn in the same childlike spirit of freedom and spontaneity, with a natural knack for creating work that is both balanced and quirky, unmistakable yet recognizable in terms of avant-garde lineages, with echoes of prehistoric and Oriental art. Based on the union of the cerebral and the physical, my work expresses an aspiration to perceive the Truth in the beauty of the soul and the infinite multiplicity of forms. One of my works was acquired by India's National Museum of Modern Art for its Canadian collection in 1989 as a winner in the National Gallery of India's International Competition. See excerpts of a review of a recent solo show at www.georgeslaoun.com/Artist-49-Runhild_Roeder.