Gerhard Rießbeck is best described as an expedition painter. His curious, adventurous and, at times playful relation to his immediate surroundings is reflected in his works of art, which is characterized by a search for a deeper understanding and knowledge of the nature and peoples relation to it. At the same time Rießbeck’s art draws attention to the paradoxical and ironic aspects of this exactly; the humans’ incessant striving after a concrete, tangible and scientific understanding of nature.

When Rießbeck is travelling around the northern hemisphere together with a team of polar explorers and scientists, it is not with the purpose of trying to measure, understand and realistically reproduce nature, but rather with an ambition to observe, discover and feel the nature and its unpredictable forces.

His phenomenological and anti-scientific agenda puts him in a lonely, sensual and unique contact with nature. A contact, which he, in an incredible way, manages to reproduce on the canvas. His numerous meetings with various natural phenomena, quiet and meditative as well as frightening and dramatic are transformed into reflective and sensitive stories on the canvas, where they in a magical way mesmerize the viewer. The stories deal with Mans immediate confrontation with the raw, harsh and sublime nature – a subject that Rießbeck, as few others, knows a lot about.

Rießbeck’s works of art has similarities with the art of the romantic landscape painters of the nineteenth century’s such as Caspar David Friedrich, but unlike this painter’s more realistic representation of the landscape, Rießbeck makes a virtue out of avoiding any kind of documentary expression. Despite the fact, that Rießbeck’s works of art are based on observation, they are far from realistic or naturalistic nature studies. Rather, they are subjective interpretations of the special, somewhat mysterious and transcendental relationship between the landscape and the human being.

Contrary to the art of the romantic painters, where a certain feeling of awe and powerlessness in relation to the great nature was dominating, we find in Rießbeck’s paintings a kind of unconditional accept and respect of the metaphysical and incredible aspects of the nature. In the same way as Friedrich, Rießbeck doesn’t paint the exact landscape but strives after presenting this indefinable gap between what can actually be represented and this magical, evocative and indescribable moment, that cannot be either verbally or visually expressed.

Amalie Frederiksen

Bachelor in Art History