Since studying drawing and painting at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts in the 1980s with teachers Volker Stelzmann, Wolfgang Peuker and Bernhard Heisig, Griesel has been exploring a naturalistic and figurative style of painting.
He discovered his love for Baroque painting and its associated genres (biblical history, devotional painting, portraiture), subjects and motifs. Deep sensations and melting colourfulness were the painterly values of this period that so fascinate Griesel. Another source of inspiration for the deepening of mytholo-gical themes are the eclectics or renaissance artists from Bologna and Venice of the early 17th century, as Winkelmann calls them.
But the incunabula of the avant-garde also stimulate him to painterly experiments: Music, rhythm, dynamics combine with freely invented, geometric or abstract forms and a cognitive colourfulness, opening up broad fields of association in which "everything can stand for everything"". With his painted black square in 1916/18, Kasimir Malevich founded the beginning of a new art movement, Suprematism. This radical reduction of painting to form and colour is still regarded today as a signpost for the renewal of art and society and an icon of modernism.
Griesel repeatedly cites the purpose of abstract painting as an icon and means of prayer, i.e. the silent dialogue between the viewer and the sacred representative, in his paintings. Griesel sets his symbols and contents against the backdrop of avant-garde art history, thus creating an exciting synthesis of abstract figuration and figurative abstraction.
Contact
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Dorfstraße
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D-39264 Straguth