Pittjes Hitschfeld

My career began in the independent and underground art scene. In Hamburg, I founded and directed Galerie Abriss, an experimental non-profit gallery active from 1986 to 1992.

My work is documented in the Central Archive of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, in the collection covering art from the 19th to the 21st century.

My paintings bring together the visual language of the Old Masters with the conflicts, myths and obsessions of the present.

I work between classical painting, Gothic imagery and contemporary culture. History, power, war, religion, technology and the human condition repeatedly enter my work.

I am interested in what survives beneath changing fashions: archaic fears, the desire for power, the fascination with violence, heroes and monsters. By placing these subjects within a traditional pictorial language, I create a tension between the historical and the contemporary.

My work could be described as a form of Gothic Modernism: contemporary painting rooted in the visual memory of European art.

Folkwang School, Essen — Department of Art and Design
State examination in Art and Design.
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
Studied under Konrad Klapheck and Joseph Beuys.

My work has been exhibited in Amsterdam, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf,London,various cities across North Rhine-Westphalia Germany and the USA, as well as in independent and underground art spaces.