Peter Seelig's photostream  

The work of Peter Seelig

The relinquishing of man in music and dance, in colour and painting, in rhythmic movement and swinging lines constitutes the theme of Peter Seelig’s work. He circuits his subject in drawings and paintings obsessively. Figures and faces allure in an expressive decidedly modern picture language presence.

In many sketch books, the likewise meditative and dynamic graphic exercises are held. Human bodies and human faces are fixed in situations and conjugations to a lively oscillating netting. Hereby many of these sheets have been prepared by method of “blind drawing”. During performances of ballets, operas or dramas the artist draws without watching the result, discreetly, and with specially designed tools.
When these sheets, released from their sketch boos, cover whole walls of exhibitions, they reproduce the experience of movement and of dance in a serried dynamic of lines.

In his painting the human form acquires a sketch like forcefulness. In a picture group one linear formulation dominates against a black background. Symbols of elementary simplicity emerge. The lines are like simultaneously those in a test arrangement , the tracks of racing electrons, becoming visible is a black eternity, and real figures of Lillith or the flowers for Alice. Strange spirals or the form of an angel flying through the dark room.

In other pictures, colour and form dominate the harmony. A group of women approach the viewer with great cheerfulness, or in an unmistakable erotic pose. Here the colour attains its greatest strength of contrast and brilliance, and the eye motive is emphasised. In other pictures the call is milder, the colour deepens, and the contour of the whole form determines the composition.

Peter Seelig’s artistic work grows out of a debate with modern art and a wide range of interests including music, theatre, ballet and literature. His lovely Vienna atelier apartment is full of books. Numerous visits to Switzerland and France, where in 1968 he experienced the enthusiasm of the students in Paris, belong to his personal biography. In philosophy, this sphere of positive energy would be described as Dionysian. The presentation of this possibility of human being is the program of his artistic work.

Prof. Ulrich Gansert