HANS JOACHIM BREUSTEDT 1901 - 1984

A private cosmos tumbles toward us. Dots and lines, colours and shapes, prisms strung together that allow us to recognise a head, a whole figure, a rider—or perhaps they do not venture quite so far, preferring to remain in uncertainty, staying ambiguous and thereby stimulating the imagination. In any case, they allow a new world to emerge. It is a world simply built, yet one that tells us so much, from rhythm, for example, which structures the sequences and which, in the interplay of drawing and color, can trigger something similar to what music does—namely through discovered harmony.

Or indeed what they actually stand for — drawing and color. It suggests that (to put it simply) drawing represents the rational, while color represents the emotional. This has always been the case in painting, but until the early 20th century, it was masked by visible content, by narrative, and by trompe-l’œil illusions. As a student of Feininger at the Bauhaus in Weimar—and a devoted exegete of Kandinsky and Klee—Hans Joachim Breustedt was convinced that painting must express states of being and sensations that lie beyond visible reality. He believed that even Cézanne’s "working alongside nature" no longer applied and that it was the painter's task to create a "new nature."

Breustedt’s paintings open up a vast panorama. Everything that can be felt by a human being becomes his subject. States of being, emotions, perceptions. There are joyful pictures characterised by serenity, music, and rhythm—images that can be comical, strange, or baffling—and there are thoroughly melancholic paintings, heavy-spirited, often dark and grave, monumental and theatrical even in small formats. And — there is everything in between. Sentiment, introspection,

grand themes from mythology, and the fundamental questions of human existence.

The essential point is that Breustedt does not depict these themes; he allows them to arise.

Grief, for example, is not told through the representation of tears, but through lines, colours,

and shapes which, in their very specific combination, trigger the sensation of grief within us.

Just as cheerfulness requires no clowns, no "comedy," nor even laughing faces.

In his numerous "heads," large and small, this becomes even more apparent. The necessary psychologization of the "sitter" does not take place in the usual manner. It is not facial

expressions, lost gazes, or pregnant poses that speak of the character and essence of the subject, but solely the painterly means: the lines, colours, and shapes, their relationship to one another, and their abstract power of expression. 

Common to all of Breustedt's paintings is an appeal—rendered into abstract painting—to trust the quiet tones. Breustedt is not a loud painter. Quite the contrary. He subtly weaves painterly surfaces that thrive on nuances, developing their magnetic pull with restraint. He challenges and disciplines us, the viewers, to recognise the essence of art in the suggested, the unagitated, and the carefully balanced. He possesses the power to sensitise us. He teaches us silence and delicacy, the softly vibrating and the shimmering—and in doing so, convincingly explains the Great Theme: "Abstraction and Empathy."

Herbert Giese