A100 | Wir fangen schon einmal damit an oder die Auflösung eines berlinerisch-gordischen Knotens

In the organizer's words:

Lust for life reigns supreme
Peter Schlangenbader
a pioneer in painting

His favorite medium remains oil paint on linen. Peter Schlangenbader (*1953), a master student of Prof. Martin Engelmann at the Berlin University of the Arts, is classically inclined. His motifs are heads, philosophers and women, skulls and aliens. His expressive pictorial language is characterized by an actively masterful use of colour and thus combines in his work the Berlin tradition of violent painting and the continuous rebellion of a big city.

In 1980, the renowned art critic Heinz Ohff described Peter Schlangenbader as the "first punk painter in Germany to go public". This art-historically significant statement refers to a significant shift in the visual arts: Schlangenbader transferred the spontaneous, raw, unsparing and subversive energy of the punk movement from music and fashion into the visual arts and opened up new paths between these scenes through his attitude.

In Schlangenbader's paintings, the poetics of vital color are deeply seized by life, an art that occupies and stimulates the inner space of both the artist and the viewer. His paintings represent a human sensibility that manifests itself in the feelings of curiosity, fear, doubt and playfulness and thematizes the link between love and transience. Above all, it is the lust for life that makes his art relevant.

Peter Schlangenbader has been working on canvas for 45 years, including 40 years in Friedenau, Berlin, in the former home of the expressionist Karl Schmitt-Rottluff. His CV includes more than two hundred solo and group exhibitions, and his studio contains hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings. His main body of work is considered complete.