Helmut Dorner studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1976 to 1982, with Gerhard Richter as one of his teachers. Although the focus of his research tended towards different painting methods, he started to exhibit drawings and sculptures in the mid-1980s. Dorner experimented with the effects of colour and structure on different surfaces, with an emphasis on brushstrokes and the relationship between image and title. His work was considered postmodernist due its nuanced, ironic and hybrid recapitulation of modernist formalism. Dorner’s sensitive approach to colour and materials made for a refreshing style that was lightyears beyond the sterile aesthetics of many other postmodernist painters. He breathed new life into a medium that had been declared dead on multiple occasions since the birth of modernism.
Dorner’s works can be divided into two main groups: small, atmospheric oil paintings and his larger varnish paintings. He initially started creating the former works in his Düsseldorf studio, while the latter were developed in Karlsruhe. This demonstrates the fact that, for Dorner, painting is inextricably linked to location, both in terms of landscape and his way of life in specific places. Dorner’s oil paintings, with their impasto quality and directly applied vertical and horizontal brushstrokes, are as tactile and physical as paintings get. His varnish paintings are different. More reticent, their smooth and reflective surfaces often feature punctuation marks, letters and numbers. They bounce back the light, like flawed mirrors, while Dorner’s oil paintings do the exact opposite, which draws our attention to them. The artist likes to combine works of both types in his exhibitions, thereby offering viewers an expansive experience. Since the early 1990s, Dorner has also been experimenting with the medium of Plexiglas, playing with transparency and opacity.
Helmut Dorner works to his own tempo and rejects the traditional spatial boundaries of paintings. He does not believe that they can ever be ‘fully finished’, or in other words, that they can function independently as hermetically sealed units. Instead, he seeks to prove they can just as easily be fragmentary, relative, and ever-changing. This is also why Dorner always creates new combinations of his works. His paintings disrupt and resonate with each other; they become one with the space they are in, but simultaneously expand that space. Dorner will exhibit a work and then make substantial changes to it before exhibiting it again. The range of effects we witness when viewing his art also depends on the vantage point from which we gaze at it, and the light at any given moment.
Dorner’s art also has an affinity with Eastern philosophies due to its inherent purity and tranquillity, but also the way it unites opposing qualities like surface and depth, or fixed shapes and movement. Although his work is traditional in one sense, it is also endlessly self-renewing. Dorner allows us to discover an entirely new complexity within an existing visual vocabulary. His art teaches us to look at surfaces with greater love and attention.
