Geometric abstractions
In this series, Saemisch ventures into formal experimentations that evoke a play of forces between line and color. Although this play involves decomposing recognizable elements, it also explores the nature of abstract shapes themselves; a creative field where geometric compositions and patterns convey movement, energy, and visual dynamism.
Powerful brushstrokes and lines irrupt into the space as the main characters of a geometrical choreography. The dialogue between form, color, and space encourage contemplation and visual discovery.
Form should be willing to disintegrate, to die, and then, in the last instant, to come into being once again, to exist in negation.
ERNST SAEMISCH
Bars
The Bars series serves as a poignant testimony inspired by the political climate of the 1970s and 1980s in Mexico and Latin America—a time overshadowed by the Dirty War, political repression, censorship, and the suppression of free expression. Profoundly affected by realities that evoked the unforgettable horrors he had experienced in his German homeland, Saemisch created a paradoxical visual metaphor. In this metaphor, an exuberant jungle is confined by bars that try to imprison color but fail to do so. Instead, the bars coexist with the colors in a dynamic pictorial interplay, expressing the dialectics between freedom and restriction.
[…] in the works I made between 1979 and 1981 I introduced a dark net of lines, not unlike wire bars, that seems to trap colors and lock them into certain spaces. Contrary to the oppressive political life in many Latin American countries and in other parts of the world, where the concept of the bars has acquired a negative connotation because of the repression of political prisoners, in my work is the bars are an exploration of the tensions between freedom and confinement.
ERNST SAEMISCH
Here, the bars are not a prison. Even though its rigid structure imposes rhythm and conveys oppression, offering no way out, it allows colors—my vital elements as a painter—to thrive freely behind its darkness. These colors shine more brightly and flow with even greater freedom than those diffracted by prisms or other optical instruments (as Newton observed 300 years ago) when momentarily confined by the rigid structure of crystals or the shifting play of opals. Their vitality is so infinitely rich that they are able to endure the dark, oppressive structures and their lack of spiritual grace—and may even overflow them.
ERNST SAEMISCH