Siegfried Anzinger is known as a painter and draughtsman, but he is also a great storyteller. What is fascinating is that his narrative art, both in language and in drawing, is equally exciting and inspires us. Now he has taken on the story of St. Jerome, one of the most important Latin church fathers, who lived as a rigorous ascetic and translated and commented on important parts of the Bible. With his light and virtuoso drawing technique, Anzinger depicts anecdotes from this story of St. Jerome in a new and unusually humorous way.
Anzinger belongs to the generation of "Neue Wilde" artists who caused a sensation in Europe in the early 1980s. His first widely acclaimed participation in an exhibition was at documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982. His painting is characterized by expressive speed and lightness of execution. He prefers to work with distemper, which best corresponds to the spontaneity of his painterly actions and, like watercolor, cannot be corrected when working on paper. Anzinger's pictorial compositions must succeed in one go. Anzinger restricts himself to a few themes, whose significance usually takes a back seat to the virtuosity of the painterly presentation. Four themes dominate his oeuvre: Animals, Madonnas, stories of creation and erotic depictions. In a conversation with Friedhelm Mennekes in 1996, he expressed his distanced, sometimes parodistic relationship to the motif: "I have found that form has its strongest effect in the moment immediately before its dissolution. Not making the invisible visible, no, making the visible almost invisible. That's what I actually want. To where you can look at it freely." His most recent drawings and watercolors are also determined by this maxim. Anzinger is a great colorist.
Anzinger's work has received numerous awards (Oskar Kokoschka Prize 1988, Grand Austrian State Prize for Fine Arts 2003, etc.), and he has been a professor of painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy since 1998.
