"Nude" Print

I use all the traditional art genres: drawing, painting, sculpture and installation. To view the different genres separately use the link to "Collections". The biggest part of my pictures shown here are the "Overpaintings". Juergen Wolfstaedter from the Wolfstaedter Gallery in Frankfurt am Main, said about my Overpaintings: Hans Jürgen Diez presents a selection of works on paper from the series Overpaintings. On display is, among other things, About El Greco (acrylic on photo paper, 29.7 × 42 cm) as well as further color works that are based on templates by significant artists such as Anthonis van Dyck or Peter Paul Rubens. From an art-historical perspective, these works connect to the long tradition of artistic appropriation and transformation. Diez uses reproductions of canonical works as a starting point but consistently dissolves their narrative, iconographic, and figurative content. What remains are condensed areas of color and compositional tensions that make the structural basic principles of the respective models visible. The focus is not on the recognizability of the motif, but on the analysis of the composition: the distribution of light and dark, the rhythm of the areas, and the color weightings that give the historical paintings their inner dynamism. Through the overpainting, the focus shifts from the narrative pictorial space to an abstract reading that translates the painterly thinking of the Old Masters into a contemporary form. Diez’s works thus move in the field of tension between art-historical reference and autonomous color composition. They are to be understood less as a quotation and more as a reflective engagement with painterly orders that have remained effective over centuries. (Text: Jürgen Wolfstaedter)