Jürgen Partenheimer

„Die Entfernung im Stand luftwärts“. What an opus. How carefully
and generously designed, how beautifully and thoughtfully structured.
That does not mean that it is possible to leaf through and skim quickly.
The book is a visual as well as a literary delight. Where is there ever
such a wonderful combination of the visual and the textual which does
justice to the occasion, seems to be demanded by the requirement but is
hardly ever achieved. An affinity for the linguistic and literary pervades
the book, and at the same time the eye is constantly drawn to the
wonderful images.

Jürgen Partenheimer has lived and worked in many places around the world
through exhibition projects and residencies and has designed new spatial
concepts for museums that have always expanded and tested the possibilities
of the work and its site-and space-related presentations. Now he has
designed a new studio with his daughter, the architect Anna Partenheimer.
The studio impresses with its spatial situation and congenial lighting: In
the first space, works on paper are created, in the middle, virtually in
the center is the archive and the thinking space and the third room is
dedicated to painting and sculpture. Space also plays a major role in the
works which are not about self-referentiality but about the visualization
of a meta-level, „the visualization of pictorial thinking“.

The hidden sides of things and the invisible - in the recesses of
echo chambers. In 1836, Hokusai began studying a classical anthology
of poetry from the thirteenth century. Through woodcuts and drawings
he responded to one hundred poems by one hundred Japanese authors.
In 2015, Jürgen Partenheimer was inspired by Hokusai’s visual
reflections to create his own series of works, „One Hundred Poets“,
on which he worked until 2021. Unlike Hokusai, Partenheimer did not
draw on a well-known anthology, but rather referred to his favorite
poems, in which he recognized something akin to an existential
resonance. The texts provided inspiration which evolved into visual
ideas, resulting in works on paper and paintings. Partenheimer
focuses on a minimalist visual language, clearly inked surfaces,
delicate pencil lines, and moments captured in watercolor. An empty
space. This invites open contemplation, perhaps even meditation. The
intention is to evoke correspondences within the ultimately
inexplicable - those which characterize every work of art. Or, as
Janet Frame puts it in her poem „Once, between myself and the pine
trees“: it is about the search of „a separate essence yielded
without threat or deceit / a truthful vocabulary of what is and is
not.“

What happens with One Hundred Poets is answering like with like in such a
way that renders any effort at further speech superfluous. Perhaps the
last word should go to Marianne Moore, who observed that: „The deepest
feeling always shows itself in silence.“ What these works by Jürgen
Partenheimer do is to respond to the poems he has chosen along lines that
not only refuse to disturb that silence, but deepen and enrich it in ways
that, as the genuine always does, strike us as both unexpected and
strangely inevitable.

In a quiet but resolved way, Partenheimer´s work engages you in a form
of aesthetic adjustment as you practice a process of unseeing and
unmaking. There is no rhetorical persuasion at stake here. The work
invites you to not just unsee your surroundings but to practice being in a
particular kind of space, where, within the drawing itself, the marks,
shapes, spaces and colours must fall away, dematerialize and disentangle
themselves from their own references. His work proposes a multiplicity of
folds and gaps in the fabric of our experience that change the cartography
of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible.

Jürgen Partenheimer’s visual world immediately captivates us via its
floating, delicate ease, its disavowal of loud gestures and elaborate
formats, its formal and tonal understatement. Partenheimer is referring
to the potentially infinite range of cohesive visual renderings that depict
the different facets of thinking. This concept of the self and the world is
predicated upon an intermittent, constantly overlapping, re-initialising
process of memory, imagination and intellectual engagement. In his oeuvre
the artist succeeds uniquely in departing from the idea of an objectively
experienced world, transforming it into a cognitive act of seeing.

The track record of Partenheimer´s early exhibitions is all the more
impressive when one takes into account that his career as a visual
artist began relatively late, as he had previously been passing his
doctorate; he rounded off his research scholarships in France,
Germany, and Mexico with a PhD thesis in the Humanities. The
thematic and contextual foundation of his work, itself nourished by
critical consciousness, coupled with their handcraft in the sense of
an authentic experience upon the object, veritably shine forth from
them, as does Partenheimer’s immense aesthetic surety. The work
itself always takes precedence and this criterion determines the
demarcation line surrounding art’s domain today, because it protects
it from the „dialectic of industrial production“; and thus,
safeguards that very quality in art which differentiates it from
everything else - its „unique selling point.“

Wherever Jürgen Partenheimer carries his marks a little over the
edges of the images in a painting or, as he repeatedly does, carries
them over the edge of the entire painting, an inner energy presses
forth beyond the pictorial expression. This is something that leaves
traces whereby that which is absent is alluded to in the present.
Relational meaning and openness rest on – and therein lies a special
feature of these works – another poetic order that arises out of the
disruption of a dualistic order. The poetic quality lies in the
difference, the alterity, in the paradoxes and the disappearance
that are chiastically connected to every appearance. From this
theoretical perspective, the paintings of Partenheimer could be
regarded as „impossible paintings“ that transgress visibility and
expressibility and allow for peculiar events.

When Jürgen Partenheimer first arrived in South Africa in September 2011
for his two-month residency at the studios of the NIROX Foundation outside
Johannesburg, he immediately began to reflect on the revelations offered
by this new experience in a diary consisting of drawings as well as verses
and notes in both German and English. On a subsequent visit to South Africa
in May 2012, he completed an artist’s book, Folded Spirits, adapting
images from his diary with poems of the South African poet Lebogang
Mashile. Folded Spirits thus points to the ultimate compatibility of two
powerful artistic sensibilities, a successful dialogue emerging from
different cultures and expressed in different forms. Here both
Partenheimer and Mashile eschew formal narrative and representation in
favor of austerely evocative abstraction. In spite of Partenheimer’s
insistent obliqueness, the work is immensely rewarding not least for the
fancies conjured by the still spaces and mysterious trails of his
discovered landscapes.

Partenheimer´s work celebrates an exquisite relation of forms and at the
same time they invite association, which is a supremely supple and
versatile act of the imagination. Partenheimer creates works that, before
they do anything else, listen. When he does make a mark, it is sure,
unapologetic, a bold gesture in black, orange or blue that enters the realm
of the paper determined to lay down something striking. Even the slimmest
of lines, the sparest of marks cannot escape detection, because they share
the space with nothing else. Despite their reticence, they cannot be missed.
And so, the work—the image and its title—oscillates between
representation and abstraction, not affirming or denying either but allowing
for the possibility of cohabitation. Like the rain in a poem by Ponge. For
all his eschewal of narrative, Partenheimer seeks, at the very least, a
location, a real - geographical, historical, political - place for each new
exploration. A point of departure.

Whatever we see in Partenheimer’s work, we don’t look for likeness but for a creative
correspondence between content and artistic process. One might say that in his work life
itself becomes aesthetically apparent, for only through aesthetic quality, through form
shaped by perception and by the comprehension of the senses does art come into existence.
Partenheimer’s work is a visualization of origination through recollection and by the conscious
reflection upon what has occurred and what now happens, upon history and in the present.
The work does not imply a return to mimesis but rather a creative association with life by
the envisioning and realization of origin.

Partenheimer perceives exhibition spaces as "centres of gravity", sites where the space
between paintings, works on paper, sculpture and sound unfolds to create a polymorphic
image. His is a philosophical investigation whereby drawing forms the basis for the poetic
articulation of his ideas. It creates new models of representation forming alternative
perceptions where the lyricism of the imagery challenges conventional interpretations of
time and space, conveying something at once essential, both condensed yet transient.

Partenheimer is extraordinary in the way he responds to circumstances,
deliberately artistic or otherwise, knowing that every gesture is read differently
according to the disposition of the reader. This is why the fragility of his work
has such strength. The relationship between Partenheimer and the chosen
circumstances is key, reminding us that all artistic experience is an equation
between subject and object to the point where there is no priority. Artistic
identity and meaning are determined absolutely by the way in which they are seen,
all about reflection and projection rather than notions of some essential
universality.

Jürgen Partenheimer is one of today’s most remarkable poetic and philosophical
artists. He spent the summer of 2006 at Nietzsche House, where he immersed himself
in Nietzsche’s "field of force" and created a unique and compelling sequence of 24
watercolours, which coalesce into a single and singular composition of breath-taking impact.
In the chosen setting he takes a twofold approach to his own work: his uncompromisingly
authentic creative energy interacts with a sovereign appreciation of Nietzsche’s oeuvre.

"The most impressive thing is the way that the rhythm according to which its compositions
were executed would appear to command their “resolution. As if in a moment of self-
reflection, Partenheimer takes a breath to prepare for what is yet to come – a marvelous
dispersion of color and lines in a larval space, all stains and lines in air! The result is
incredibly precise – the city haunts the space of the drawing. A discovery imposes itself:
Partenheimer draws the drawing of the world and, simultaneously, the world of drawing."

"In the transitory states that Partenheimer succeeds in presenting so strikingly we can
see a distinctive feature of the rich imagery of his work, which is highly valued not
only in Europe, but also in the United States and Japan. His unmistakable artistic
style – an ambivalence of strength and delicacy transposed intoa poetic state – reveals
a mastery that is at the same time a tangible demonstration of why Partenheimer has
found international recognition as an outstanding artist of his generation."

"Texts in which artists speak about their work are rare. Most artists speak only in
the language of their art. They know the difference between speaking about art,
as art critics and theorists do it, and speaking as artists, which can never be objective.
The best texts are those that speak specifically from the experience of the artistic
situation and describe the artist’s experience frankly and unsparingly. As an artist’s
text, “Copan” belongs to this rare genre. Its value lies not in any immediate compre-
hensibility for the reader, but rather in the closeness of what is spoken to what is done.
The paradox of Partenheimer’s text lies in his ability to track his ownexperiences almost
continuously and at the same time open them up for reflection."

In his drawings Partenheimer speaks of the „disciplines of nothingness“. To relate
to this nothingness and yet at the same time to produce drawings of such richness
is precisely the art which this ‘oeuvre’ achieves. It is about transformation,
about sublimation of reality into a second-degree reality, a reality in which the
artist reacts to the constraints of the present according to his own laws. The
abstraction of Jürgen Partenheimer´s drawings pays hommage to timelessness. His
drawings are a tribute to the authority of art and it is precisely in their
hermetic otherness that they respect the world, and they serve as a tribute to the
beauty inherent in their radical autonomy. Their right to freedom, which they
exercise as a matter of course, is the conclusion they draw from the history of
culture.

"The work of Jürgen Partenheimer, emerged in Germany in the 1980s, reveals to us
today, through the various art forms in which it is expressed, drawing, painting,
sculpture and poetry, the artist’s profound experience of art and life. Partenheimer
follows the great tradition of Modernity, developing his work on the foundations
of Abstraction. Although he belongs to the generation of German artists who worked
with painting to deliberately revisit the medium and its history, recycling or revision
have no place in his “aesthetic” project, nor does he use any strategies of appropriation
or deconstruction. His work fits into that segment of artistic production which invests in
maintaining artistic functionality and giving continuity to valuesand themes that have
always been present in the great works of mankind: beauty, imagination, dreams as
a way to order and interpret a reality that challenges man’s willpower."

"Like the poet who plays with the resonance of words, with the mere echoes of what
they mean, Partenheimer approaches his subject matter at the very boundary of its
corporeality, at the verypoint of transition between its materiality and its immateriality.
We find the same profound experience of art and the world, which he employs in his
drawings with the utmost subtlety in his sculptures, too. They are themselves the occasion
and place of his poetical expression: the individual attributes of every form, their relationship
to each other, the various levels at which colour and line operate. In spite of their architec-
tonic order and its formalizing influence, Parten-heimer's sculptures are distinguished by an
abstract poetical quality. Like a musical composition, they vibrate with the rhythm, repetition
and juxtaposition of forms; they seem to express a state of uncertainty and inconsistency,
seductively calling in question the viewer's own preconceived certainties."

Jürgen Partenheimer has abandoned the classical functional relationship between
model and sculpture, bypassed the step to apparent finality, and elevated the free
variation of sculpture to the actual goal. Behind the minimalist simplicity of his
sculptural oeuvre there lies an infinite abundance of the unrepresentable.
Sensitivity and critical attention shape the artist´s approach to his models of
the world. The focus is not on the masterful command of as wide a variety of
techniques as possible but rather on the consistent approach to ideas and their
realization.

"Partenheimer redefines the museum space as a dynamic place. Precisely because
the museum can be stripped of any predominant identity, Partenheimer manages to
lend the same space ever-new meanings. Thus he not only suc-ceeded in causing
wonder and drawing attention: he also managed to impose a new identity on the
museum space.With extreme effectiveness Partenheimer succeeds in creating a
new universe, in which works of art are signs and signals that open the gates of
a metaphysical, spiritual reality."

"There is something, which I should like to emphasize: one of the preconditions for
Partenheimer's successful development of abstraction is his strong imagination.
Indeed, it is precisely this precondition, which motivates his exploratory quest
for form. Indeed, the true talent of Partenheimer lies in his ability to find the most
suitable image for expressing his inner spiritual world and to create an abstract
form in which resides true spiritual meaning."

"What impresses me immediately is Partenheimer's masterly use of line, which,
in conjunction with areas of color, organizes the painting in a most sublime way.
Just one or two lines, hardly thicker than a hair, can dominate the entire surface of
the painting and guide the viewer's eye to its every part, however small. The mono-
chrome areas of color are richly nuanced and seem, at times, to constitute the funda-
mental structure of the painting, whilst the emotional component finds expression
purely in Partenheimer's handling of the line. It is precisely in this combination of line
and surface that the extraordinary and impressive quality of Partenheimer's art lays."

"The extraordinary, enigmatic quality common to all of Partenheimer's works may not be
immediately recognizable to the Chinese viewer, but the latter can nevertheless relate to
his works through that intuitive feeling which reaches beyond cultural differences.
The very fact that "World Axis" is a three-dimensional column created from two-dimen-
sional surfaces reflects the philosophical aspect of Partenheimer's art. It visualizes the
translation of his philosophical way of thinking into a poetical dimension. Indeed,
the Chinese visitors to Partenheimer's exhibition were able to accept the artist purely
emotionally and not by reason of reports and reviews in the media. Never before has
any Western artist achieved such a high degree of acceptance in China."

Partenheimer interprets the dualism of gestural and geometric forms in terms of
content. His paintings do not refer to the factuality of the American Minimalists,
but rather resemble linguistic grids, lyrically interwoven in terms of content.
His painting is the image of a worldview, the model of a modern discourse, and at
the same time a form of imagination. The contextual references – the image as
language, the title as text – create a second, important associative level of
meaning and expand the viewer’s perception of the image. Guided by his criteria
rooted in the European tradition, the artist embraces the indeterminacy of the
image, viewing art as the preservation of the unspeakable, within whose free zone
the question of the nature of things remains open.

"Jürgen Partenheimer, who has held numerous exhibitions in international museumsis
one of the most important and singular artists in the current German scene. Why is
Partenheimer unique? In my opinion, it is because of his distance towards any type
of expressionism, his resolutiuon on keeping off the beaten track and his capability of
reconciling a formal project with a constructive and postminimalist background and
a poetic intensity that makes him prefer the light to the verbose and the subtle
to the obvious."

"The most outstanding characteristic of Partenheimer´s work is the coexistence of
order and passion. A composing order which is also a subtle, thin weft: flexible,
but determinant; a passion present from the beginning, uniquely unveiled in the
course of a visit to one of his exhibitions, in the contemplation of each work, -
sculpture, painting or drawing. Partenheimer affords us an insight into the act of
creation, somewhat in the style of Mondrian in his New York years. But much more
magical, and always able to go one step further. Partenheimer forever performs a
balancing act, pushing subtlety and fragility to their very limits, but never going
too far. His imagery expresses the delicacy and coherence of his balance."

"Partenheimer´s familiarity and affection for the cultures and literatures both west
and east of the Atlantic is a defining element of his personal and aesthetic relationships.
Writers on Partenheimer´s work invariably dwell on the salient qualities of his lines,
which are not the periphery of volumes but singular forms themselves. They inhabit
the evanescent margin between what they are – dark, quavering and changeable –
and whatthey propose. The most arduous work of an artist is the organization of the
images of the imagination, the giving of context, both aesthetic and social, for the
profoundest of one’s expression. Partenheimer is an outstanding artist who has built
this context eloquently and most convincingly."

"Throughout his career, Partenheimer has explored the potentials of formal invention and
visual narrative through an exceptionally diverse range of books. As essential as his
related paintings, prints, and particularly, his drawings, Partenheimer´s unique,
revised and editioned books have contributed as much as his numerous paintings, prints
and especially his drawings, which are occasionally related to the books, to condensing
his so constantly exhibited art to the essential."

"One cannot help thinking of René Magritte when talking about Jürgen Partenheimer. Whilst
in their art they are worlds apart, their minds are alike. It is in their minds that
they develop their respective concepts of painting. Both of them take words and images
“literally” and “at their face value”. The content is controlled and determined by the
intellect with the utmost precision. The conceptualization of art is a common concern of
these artists separated by half a century. They think and write and paint, the older one
concretely, the younger one abstractly. What are we trying to say? The ever-awake
consciousness of the reflective artist measures and maps the “free space” of art and its
practice, which is constantly being redefined."

"Partenheimer has not only thoroughly entangled the figure/ground relationship,
but he has also subverted the relationship between what we might designate as
solid and transparent planes. We begin to recognize that his works are rigorously
thought-out tereatises on the very nature of sight and ist changing relationship
to knowledge. By b ringing us both visually and philosophically to this brink,
Partenheimer engages us with deeper questions. What is the nature of imagination?"

"Partenheimer´s drawings grope for forms because he does not want to draw some-
thing that is already a definition; he prefers to wait and see whether he can be lured
in other directions while he is drawing. That is how Kandinsky worked, with an
abstract morphology - just like Partenheimer - which advanced instinctively, gropingly.
His drawings seem to be whispering to us, as do the paintings, like watercolors."

"La pintura, los dibujos de Partenheimer, como destellos de serenidad. Toko no ma:
lugares en los que experimentamos el sentimiento de que el aire encierra una espesura
de silencio, que en esa oscuridad reina una serenidad eternamente inalterable. „Entonces –
escribe Tanizaki – dónde reside la clave del misterio? Pues bien, voy a traicionar el secreto:
mirándolo bien no es sino la magia de la sombra; expulsad esa sombra producia por todos
esos recovecos y el toko no ma enseguida recuperará su realidad trivial de espac io vacío
y desnudo.“ Partenheimer crea desde ese misterio, pero drigiendo la voluntad hacia
el maelstrom."

White rising wax: „snow moon“, and Yellow: „the mild color of clay, the soft glow
of honey“. Insinuations. A slight shift of the line or movement in every
retraction. It is the unstable yet not the truly fragile, rather, it is that which
corresponds to the actual reality of the universe - that essential instability,
which is also a triumph. Red is „intolerant“ and „the principle of celebration and
life“. Grey is the „guarding mediator“, it „surrounds the slumber of angels“. Such
sentences writes Jürgen Partenheimer in his text „De Coloribus“ and his lines,
which pose a challenge to the mind were on display in Madrid. I’m not sure if
anyone can resist the temptation to master them for themselves.

Partenheimer understands style individually as an expression of his way of
thinking, as a „temperament“ that should be explored in all its contradictions
rather than defined; „spectral thinking“ is his motto. And it is precisely this
that gives Partenheimer´s work a distinctive place in the art scene of recent
decades.

“A point in space is a place for an argument“, said Wittgenstein. Here the conversation
twists and turns with self-reflective, defining intelligence, seeking the edges of proposal
itself, the characteristic „where“ of geometry’s thoughtful condition. Jürgen Partenheimer
moves space in a multiplicity of gestures, shakes of scale, of densities, surfaces, depths of
immanent positions, and rounds and squares of the enduring circle. The either / or of the
monochromatic echoes in shades and shiftings, tones sounding tones upon tones.
The measure is all one can reach at last."

"Partenheimer has a philosophical mind capable of visualizing intellectual positions
and counter positions - his inventiveness operates on many different levels of meaning
and he affords us a wide scope of possibilities operating on two levels of perception:
a NOT YET level and a NOT ANY MORE level. These two levels may be made to
work either separately or together with the aid of the same formula used by Alain
Robbe-Grillet to overcome the traditional antinomies of reason resulting from the
dualityof construction and destruction.We speak of non-objective forms and overlook
the fact that they are themselves a new kind of objectivity: the form of things unknown
(Shakespeare). Partenheimer’s art plays a part in this, too. It does so through its basso
continuo, its hoveringquality, which causes uncertainty, indeed it revokes all factual
certainties and in this way bestows upon them an astonishing and strong raison d’être."

For Jürgen Partenheimer the line as movement appears to be deliberate and genuine,
an evident reference to the poetics of space and the magic of time. Whilst
trailing unforeseeable directions, his drawings reveal the unlikely and succeed in
achieving it with almost mysterious clarity. In terms of character, his oeuvre is
similar to Kandinsky´s conception of the „spiritual“ in its connections to early
Neoplatonic ideas - namely, that art leads dialectically from the contemplative to
a more rational level. The perfect image is then a synthesis of intuition and
awareness, and in Partenheimer´s work, this results in a non-linear and
non-hierarchical image.

To me, Partenheimer´s drawings look like visions of Archaic fragments, of ecstatic
Sappho, or Zen Haiku celebrating ineffable nowness – a taste for feeling,
breathing, knowing at the depth of sinew, bone, and synapse. Their intellect and
pulsating manufacture, of the highest and most elemental kind - eloquent spaces –
punctuations of time, mind, body and field – deeply grounded in silent, reflective
experience.

In contrast to the empty chains of signifiers in postmodern art - those empty
shells which refer ad infinitum to new emptiness without ever revealing a trace of
meaning - Partenheimer succeeds, and this, I believe, is what sets him apart, in
imbuing abstract lines, signs, and symbols with such inner weight that individual
lines, light as a feather, seem to bear the weight of an entire world. These works
are a mental projection that unfolds before us like a landscape, revealing a
universe of the movement of thought to the viewer.

Engaging with Jürgen Partenheimer’s work requires a willingness to transcend the
concept of time as temporality; this means being able to journey far beyond what
the superficial concept of time can grasp - a concept that still organizes its
passage linearly. We must open ourselves to a cyclical passage of time - a
conception of time, in other words, that Plato described in his „Timaeus“ as a
moving image of eternity. Thus, memory and utopia intertwine. In Partenheimer’s
work, we experience a subtle process of sedimentation, of revealing and
concealing.

The strength of Jürgen Partenheimer´s images is the strength that comes with
powerlessness. The signs he devises are delicate, the shapes expose their own
fragility; yet they are vehicles for the energy of directness. When you look at a
Partenheimer work you feel that it is addressing you and no one else. In
Partenheimer´s art, equilibrium is not even or still; it oscillates, as it
actually does in life, where keeping one´s balance simultaneously involves risk
and folly, fear and fun. For Partenheimer, „the image is not the result of an
analytic procedure, it is the result of a synthesis. The image expresses a way of
thinking, it is a definition of reality.“ Between myth and contemporary science,
Partenheimer has continued a play of dualistic terms usually considered opposed to
each other.

The space of Drawing, Painting, Exhibiting: approaching everything with the
consciousness of the act of work, giving, projecting of oneself - - - in the game
of chance, of the free movement of the hand on paper or canvas, we find that
nothing is fortuitous or abandoned to itself - - - Jürgen Partenheimer leads every
move, coat and determination of place with the same intensity of meaning and
importance given to each element in relation to the whole. The language of point
and line of Kandinsky or the language of medial states in Klee, the language of
speech itself in Beuys, as well as the language of writing, i.e., drawing and
painting in Partenheimer - - - represent fundamentally the same question and
conviction about the reality of the creative vision, even though on different
levels of individual manifestation and presentation of the content.

Partenheimer´s drawings are deceptive in their simplicity. Behind the facade of
simplicity lies a tremendous amount of cerebral activity. Each work is the result
of a long process of reduction, beginning with a series of drawings from nature,
mostly of trees. These then are refined into elemental forms, the reduction
process reflecting the search for the most meaningful aspects of the original
motif in respect to what will best produce a rhythmic unity of form in space.
Ultimately, one realizes that the drawing is truly a microcosm, a distillation and
reflection of something truly vast in space and meaning.