A school of painterly vision— the artist Jochen Hein offers nothing less. From a distance Hein’s paintings seem to depict the surface of the sea, green meadows, or vast skies. But upon closer inspection, the reality of the paintings and our perception split. Nothing is the way it seems. Instead of being realistic landscape paintings, the pictures vaporize into pure color the closer one gets to them. And not only that, but what the eye has recognized as reality up to then turns out to be a laboratory of processes, in which the colors merge, wet on wet, and the paint is dripped, sprayed, wiped with a painting cloth, removed, and thickly daubed. A look at his complicated painting technique is revealed, just as it would be during a visit to the artist’s studio. Hein’s works are distinguished by the fact that they not only show painted nature, but the nature of painting, as well. Fascinated, the viewer realizes that the figurative and the abstract are the same here—even the illusion is an illusion.

JOCHEN HEIN (*1960, Husum) lives in Hamburg. Hein attended the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften (University of applied sciences), Hamburg. His first monograph, Die Natur des Menschen (The nature of man) appeared in 2013.