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The master of the margins. Petra Amtsberg Hoffmann does not paint the centre of the world but its edges. She devotes herself to seemingly random impressions, to what we perceive “in passing” – sounds, scents, atmospheric irritations. In her pictures these inconspicuous side scenes become the main characters. What others treat as an ornamental backdrop becomes, in her work, the engine of expression. It is no coincidence that the viewer’s gaze wanders across her paintings for a long time: there is no centre, no unambiguous perspective, no dominant form. And that is precisely where their strength lies. Her works operate at the edges of the visible – where feeling overtakes reason.

Not déjà vu – but poetic spaces of resonance. The idea of “déjà vu” as simple repetition falls short with Amtsberg Hoffmann. Her pictures are not repetitions but poetic condensations of atmosphere, memory and sensual presence. Her painting is not an operating system but a space of resonance: emotional, fleeting and at the same time highly precise. She works with what eludes language. It is as if she wanted to capture the scent of a summer’s day in colour, to translate the sound of a memory onto canvas. Here there are parallels to the work of Cy Twombly, whose works likewise moved between script, poetry and colour. “To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of risk – each time you begin,” Twombly said. Petra Amtsberg Hoffmann paints from exactly this moment of risk.

Carsten Lehmann, gallerist, Konsum 163, Munich (translated from German)

konsum163.art

This story begins way back, with our 15-year-old selves sitting across from each other at a work table and Petra blending colours in her school kit, demonstrating how to mix a skin tone – not too pink, not too chalky, not too grey, just right.

Little did I know that my childhood memory would be prophetic. In the nearly twenty years that Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann has been a member of the professional art community, colour perfectionism, honed to great finesse, has been a defining characteristic of her work.

Amtsberg-Hoffmann explains: “…[W]hen I started the ‘beetles sequence’ (Coleoptera Series) I looked at my yellow colour pots. They were all wrong. I needed a yellow that worked well in thin lines, a colour that I could heap and structure. I suddenly remembered this little tube of Sennelier’s yellow that I had stashed away somewhere. I used it straight out of the tube for the antennae and legs. See the pile-up where I squeezed out more?”

She continues: “I always need splash colours. There will be a firecracker in the palette. They capture craziness. Milky yellow is recurrent. Orangey translucent amber is in high demand right now. I like the greyish lilac of Caput Mortuum. Other colours I need to stabilise and mellow out: sandy shades, concrete or other mixed greys. Dark hues I prefer to mix myself.”

Her choice of colours, though seemingly nonchalant and swift in its application, is complex and exacting, and belies a rigorous process of selection and artful blending, often from scratch, using pigments.

There is a riotous feistiness in Amtsberg-Hoffmann’s work, a testament to an experiencing mind, an agile curiosity and perceptiveness that refuses to become jaded, that rejects everything mechanistic and restrictive. Her art is ambiguously abstract, yet clear in its statement of vivid commentary on inner processes.

“It isn’t about myself at all, really,” she says. “Of course, there is this idea or that memory that wants out when I start a painting. Then my canvas splits from myself and starts telling its own stories. These are apart from mine, yet still mine. This is when I need to step back, listen in and work with a very light hand. The painting will tell me what it needs. Sometimes I need to stop and set it aside for a long time. Sometimes I need to take drastic action like continuing upside down. At times I can proceed really quickly and everything is very clear. Sometimes I need to take it slowly, especially when working with oils, which I favour lately. Surprises me every time.”

Her abstract compositions of layered, intense colour planes and powerful linear movements are open to figurative or spatial interpretation. Her more figurative drawings invite the viewer to relish the colours and the details of her brushwork’s sensuality.

Amtsberg-Hoffmann’s art is deeply personal. It happily transgresses boundaries into olfaction, sound, dance and taste, and aims directly at the viewer’s senses. Her synaesthetic approach is mirrored in her playful and suggestive picture titles, which are often poetic clues to deeper, more private levels of meaning.

With its startling immediacy and its lucid style, her art stays memorable across an evolution of painting techniques, formats and colour preferences. Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann’s works are the imprint of a deeply felt energy and dynamism, and an expression of pure joie de vivre.

Andrea Schaffner Dittler M.A., art historian

Since 2003 Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann has consistently pursued her career as a painter and has presented her work to the public in regular exhibitions. A particularly inspiring experience was her summer term at the Salzburg academy in 2014 with the painter Norbert Bisky, who encouraged her to produce large-format, colour-intensive and experimental works. Today, at the Orangerie, Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann presents a new cycle of works: high-contrast pictures that impress above all through their spatial effect. A return to the artist’s professional roots explains her pronounced sense of spatial design, which can clearly be read in these newly composed works. Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann studied interior architecture in Rosenheim from 1982 to 1986.

To approach the legibility of her pictures, it is important to look at her working method. The artist usually begins a new working period with numerous small watercolour, pencil or ink studies (A3 and smaller). With quick brushstrokes she captures spatial situations in a street café or at home, fixes fragments of landscape in colour, playfully traces insects, or joyfully sets down a painterly gesture on paper several times and varies it with imagination. This initiates a working process that involves intense concentration on painting itself. The painting hand, free of content, is loose and without intention. In a further step the many studies are spread out in the studio. Whereas the watercolours and drawings first served as a means of concentration and liberation, they now become studies of inspiration from which the artist takes the details she needs and incorporates into her large-format works.

At the beginning she usually lays the stretcher covered with primed canvas on the floor of her studio and works the surface with large brushes. Sometimes the brush is attached to a stick so that the painter can leave her coloured traces on the surface with a large sweeping movement – not only of the hand but of the whole body. This is a very dynamic act, without fixing a direction or determining top and bottom. Enthusiastically and full of energy, the artist works the picture from all sides, turning and rotating it. If it seems necessary, she stands the picture upright. The liquid paint then becomes visible in its substance as it runs down the canvas in long rivulets. Sometimes she simply splashes the liquid paint from the dripping brush onto the canvas. Finally, the resulting surface of brush marks and paint stains is set aside to dry. As Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann uses fast-drying acrylic paint, this is a quick process. In further steps the canvas is brought out again, sometimes worked with oil and pastel crayons, painted over with colours of varying density, details are worked out and new forms developed.

Against this background we can now look at one of her most recent works, the square painting with the amusing title “Mrs Smellgood” (acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm), presumably an allusion to the fact that colours also appeal to the senses of taste and smell.

“Mrs Smellgood” belongs to the new cycle in which Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann concentrates on the spatial quality of colour. The new arrangement in her picture recalls the compositional strategies of Francis Bacon. The artist places areas of impulsively applied paint, whose brushwork remains legible, next to calm areas without any trace of the brush. This creates an existential ambivalence between vibrating expressiveness and an emptiness that holds concentration and contemplation. The effect is heightened by the juxtaposition of opaque, pigment-rich areas and transparent, liquid ones. In places the artist seems to want to evoke bodies and spaces of colour. An affinity with the works of Mark Rothko is evident – pictures which usually have the character of a great stillness that invites the viewer to become absorbed in them, prompting a meditative attitude for which they become a sounding board. Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann’s pictures, too, contain colour fields with spatial and spiritual weight.

“Mrs Smellgood” is further characterised by the vivid, luminous colours the artist prefers on her palette. Bright pastel tones, white areas, glowing yellow, red and green stand in strong contrast to the earthy red, almost monochrome field. In places it looks as if painted pieces of canvas had been glued on, as in a collage.

Besides patches of colour and gradients there are calligraphic scribbles and traces on the canvas. Circular lines in white oil crayon condense in the middle of the picture; linear scratch marks can be seen along the lower edge. Here the line is rarely an outline – it is a carrier of energy: sweeping and dynamic, sometimes hectic and aggressive, sometimes joyfully rhythmic. In the painting “Scuba” (acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm), for example, we encounter an accumulation of dots, small circles and sweeping lines, crosses and thin strokes set closely side by side. Here the grammar of Cy Twombly’s graphic approach can be discerned.

In some of her older pictures, recognisable details such as facial features, animal bodies or objects move along the border between abstraction and figuration through overpainting and overlapping with further fields of colour. She takes this play between abstraction and figuration to the extreme in her latest picture “A little bit of feelgood” (acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm). At first glance the viewer believes he is looking at a still life with spatial depth: a table with a vase of flowers on the left, further jugs and vessels on a white tablecloth. But a closer look reveals that linear elements stand confidently alongside painterly planes that carry no meaning and describe no object. Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann demonstrates what pure painting can achieve and plays with illusion. In this balanced picture the expressive has given way, the spontaneous has flowed into the rhythm of free forms.

Dr. Cornelia von Detten, art historian, on the exhibition “Riot of Colour”, Orangerie Munich, 2018 (translated from German)

Norbert Bisky, one of the most renowned contemporary German painters, lives and works in Berlin.

“Petra Amtsberg’s energetic paintings – in luminous colours and many differently applied layers – master the balancing act of colours and forms in an impressive way. Thanks to their abstract and expressive compositions and their strong mode of expression, Amtsberg’s works often recall high points of Willem de Kooning’s oeuvre. With calm and sure instinct, Amtsberg arrives at powerful compositions that consistently and independently carry forward current painterly positions such as that of Cecily Brown.”

Norbert Bisky, 1 September 2015 (translated from German)

norbertbisky.com

In 1953 Oskar Kokoschka founded the International Summer Academy in Salzburg, a “School of Seeing” that remains exemplary to this day. Since then, numerous renowned artists – from Markus Lüpertz and Jörg Immendorff to Daniel Spoerri, Günther Uecker and Ai Weiwei – have taught and supported artists and students from all over the world there.

In 2013 and 2014 Norbert Bisky – himself once a student of the Summer Academy and one of the most renowned representatives of contemporary painting in Germany – took on a summer class. When Petra Amtsberg Hoffmann heard about it, she successfully applied for one of the coveted places.

The course was to become the spark for a new phase in the work of the Munich-born artist: her challenging and direct engagement with Bisky’s artistic work – above all his faces and his manner of painting, whose intense centrifugal force recalls an agglomeration of splash panels – led to a new approach to working in large formats, which in turn led to the founding of the Riemerling Studios with their spacious studio areas.

The large-format, colour-intensive, experimental painting in Salzburg was followed in her own studio by an urge for ordering focus. Returning to her professional roots in architecture, Amtsberg first moved from the large painterly format to figurative drawing, from multi-layered painting to line, and from exuberant colour to the dark outline. Fed by memory, countless heads and portraits emerged. They were set down quickly on small sheets of paper with marker, acrylic, ink and watercolour, or staged as lithographs. These periods – understood by the artist as phases of rest and gathering in which new thoughts can find space and develop – have since always been followed by phases of dynamic, even explosive work on ever larger supports.

Inspired and encouraged by Norbert Bisky, Amtsberg transfers the portraits tested in countless variations into large-format canvases. A rich colourfulness pours over the ground. Amtsberg experiments with the possibilities of form and colour, sets accents and thus arrives at a pictorial statement that oscillates between abstraction and figuration. Only at second glance does the viewer grasp the actual subject of the picture – and that is entirely intended. Amtsberg aims for a field of tension that allows the viewer “to discover something new again and again … something hidden, not immediately obvious”. She plays with processes of perception and seems to follow Peter Doig’s interest in “what we miss when we concentrate on what immediately catches the eye”.

Acrylic is her preferred medium because it dries quickly. In her works the artist develops a form of rhythm reminiscent of Cecily Brown’s approach. Brown’s credo “I am looking slowly so that I can paint quickly” also applies to Amtsberg. Once begun, the painting process is driven forward quickly; layer upon layer is applied and a pictorial structure emerges. At this point the artist distances herself from her works, sets pictures aside for a while, often even turns them, and thus tests their expressiveness before “tidying up” her pictures – as she affectionately calls it – in additive and subtractive processes. Overlays are uncovered again, other parts of the picture painted over or restructured with the ordering hand of the architect through powerful strokes and networks of lines. True explosions of colour now cover the picture and oscillate between gestural painting, abstraction and representation. Areas left white reveal glimpses of what lies beneath; they do not interrupt the dynamism of the picture but heighten it through the resulting bipolarity. It is the interplay of exuberant dynamism, even restlessness, and the recapturing and embedding of the act of painting in ordered, calm waters that makes Petra Amtsberg’s pictures so special. Her painting develops centrifugal forces, strives apart, and is carefully reined in again by her.

Energetic and serene, diverse and structured, calm and passionate, thoughtful and always open to the new: the Apollonian-Dionysian principle defined by Schelling as a pair of concepts is inscribed in the very nature of the artist Petra Amtsberg. Asked about her sources of inspiration, Amtsberg consistently names artists whose works address the polarity of things in the most diverse ways.

Besides Norbert Bisky and Peter Doig she names, in breathless succession, Cecily Brown and her painterly handwriting, Egon Schiele and his line that captures every mode of being, Maria Lassnig’s people, Henri Matisse’s floating lightness, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s wild grasp and Mark Rothko’s “multiforms” with their moving, overpowering and colliding layers of colour. She experiments with the insights she gains from the art of modernism and the present. The result of this creative will, which flows into very free and independent works, reveals itself to the viewer as a firework of colours, forms and pictorial associations – or, as Norbert Bisky puts it: “With calm and sure instinct, Amtsberg arrives at powerful compositions … Her energetic paintings … master the balancing act of colours and forms in an impressive way.”

Stephanie Gilles M.A. works as an art and cultural educator in Landshut and Munich. Her partners include the Neue Galerie Landshut, the Museums of the City of Landshut and the Bavarian National Museum. (Translated from German)

Ladies and gentlemen, dear Petra,

just imagine: you are walking along the street. A car stops, the driver winds down the window and asks: “Can you tell me where I want to go?” You may think: an Austrian! Then you look more closely. Indeed – it’s Gerhard Richter, the world-famous painter!

We know that Gerhard Richter is not much for orientation. He says: “When I paint an abstract picture, I know neither beforehand what it is supposed to look like, nor, during the painting, where I want to go and what I should do to get there. That is why painting is a kind of blind, desperate effort.”

“Desperate effort” may sound hopeless, but not only in Gerhard Richter’s case it leads again and again to a remarkable happy ending. And that is exactly why we are here today, curious about Petra’s journey into the unknown.

Like most people here, perhaps, I am no art luminary – just an ordinary viewer whom Petra’s works have accompanied for several years and who has grown fond of them. I prefer to leave a profound judgement of Petra’s art to Norbert Bisky – like Richter, from the premier league of art. In recent years Bisky has become a kind of artistic mentor for Petra. He sees in her works “energetic paintings that master the balancing act of colours and forms in an impressive way”. With calm and sure instinct, he says, she arrives at powerful compositions.

Powerful compositions? Yes, indeed. That cannot be overlooked here today. They are also a reflection of Petra’s personality. As I have come to know and appreciate her as a friend and as an artist of life, many factors shape her style and meaning: besides craft and creativity, above all a big heart, a decisive, hands-on nature and a life with exclamation marks.

I find it hard to imagine Petra as a neo-impressionist pointillist, absorbed in herself, composing sweeping landscapes and city skylines from millions of tiny dots of colour over years of work. Instead I associate Petra with the really big sweep, with bathing in emotions and colours, with the pleasure of contradiction and the cheerful enjoyment of life in its fullness. That is what her works tell me.

Gerhard Richter, of course, can express this much better than I can: “Abstract pictures are fictitious models because they illustrate a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can infer.”

So let us simply look, let ourselves be inspired and perhaps drift a little. The beautiful thing about art is that we don’t always have to know exactly where we want to go.

Thank you very much – and enjoy!

Marcus Schick, Munich – Gräfelfing, at the opening in the Bürgerhaus Gräfelfing, 2015 (translated from German)

Excerpt from the speech by Professor Johanna Haberer – journalist, theologian, professor and vice-president of the University of Erlangen – at the opening of the exhibition in 2008:

“Petra Amtsberg Hoffmann is an interior architect; as the mother of four children she runs a family business, and she is married to the Gräfelfing architect Achim Hoffmann. She has been devoted to painting since her school days. She got serious about this passion ten years ago, when she joined the Atelierprojekt and began to experiment with concentration. Here we see works from ten years: from an abstract play with colours and forms on the way to an airy contour – the dashed-off hint of a headdress, of an abandoned chair – decorative, bold, warm-hearted, utterly emotional and vital, and multi-layered both in craftsmanship and in effect.

Some pictures appear almost like reliefs thanks to the flat, structured application of paint; depth is created by several layers of colour applied vigorously one over the other, partly thickened with sand, partly running. Petra Amtsberg Hoffmann’s pictures are dialogues, conversations with herself that often stretch over a long time; they tell of grief and exuberance, of the ever new that irresistibly emerges from the old.

This is the first time Petra Amtsberg Hoffmann is exhibiting – after many years of secret artistic dialogue. It is like revealing a secret, and today we may witness it. I find it an almost scandalously enjoyable secret!”

Prof. Dr. Johanna Haberer, 2008 (translated from German)

de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_Haberer

“The philosopher Jürgen Mittelstraß has called the world we live in – where the boundaries between milieus, sciences and arts have become brittle, where guilds and pigeonholes are opened and we must become multilingual – a ‘Leonardo world’. The artist and inventor, manager and engineer Leonardo da Vinci is presented, as it were, as the prototype of a modern, holistically acting person: versatile, multi-layered, diverse, permeable, crossing boundaries, and keen to keep shaping himself throughout his life, expressing himself in many languages.

If you like, we have two artists among us today who represent such prototypes of modernity. For them, art is one aspect of their lives – an essential, a decisive one, but not the only one. One cannot say that these two artists are amateurs – far from it. They are professionals for whom art is not a bread-and-butter job but a labour of love – and who are nevertheless worth selling their works, their pieces of art, because the value of art must have some kind of yardstick.”

Opening words for the joint exhibition of the sculptor Götz Zarges and the painter Petra Amtsberg Hoffmann (translated from German)

Petra Amtsberg Hoffmann’s exhibition “Inside – Outside” opens at the Bürgerhaus Gräfelfing

Gräfelfing – The Bürgerhaus in Gräfelfing shines in strong colours and forms. Colours as far as the eye can see. The reason is the opening of an exhibition by the Gräfelfing artist Petra Amtsberg Hoffmann.

A trained interior architect, she has always had an affinity for colours, forms, surfaces and lines. This talent is plainly visible in her pictures, which positively sparkle with colourful energy and a variety of forms. Her mentor Norbert Bisky recognised this too. At the Summer Academy in Salzburg in 2014 he encouraged her to paint large formats; she should not interrupt what comes out of her, the academic painter said at the time. Amtsberg Hoffmann stuck to exactly that over the following two years – and worked towards an astonishingly expressive exhibition.

She first paints spontaneously in colour; only in a second step do surfaces, lines, light and shadow emerge in her pictures. This can be seen in the large painting “Cielo” (sky): the artist first determined the strong colouring with acrylics and then worked out lines and forms. “It’s a bit like a ceiling painting in a church – it has something heavenly about it,” says the Munich-born artist.

For her small works on paper in A4 format she was inspired by photographs from newspapers and simply started drawing. Copying, however, is not her thing, so the models give rise to independent pictures that attain their own individuality in the artist’s drawing style. These small studies in turn revived her desire to paint large – this is how the work “Green Double” came about. The left picture is the expressive interior of herself: “inside”. The right picture is the controlled image, “outside”, showing a portrait. The title of the exhibition, “inside – outside”, thus relates very concretely to the inner and outer world of the artist, who chose Gräfelfing as her home.

In the large acrylic painting “Froschkönig” (Frog King) she worked with strong yellow, white and pink. She created interesting compositional overlays of colour, sometimes contoured with lines; light and dark areas also create a sense of depth. In this way she ensures that every viewer believes they see something different in the abstract picture.

Amtsberg Hoffmann’s pictures relate directly to her life and her personal (inner) world. The works reflect her delight in painting. With vigorous brushstrokes and powerful colour compositions she lives out her emotions and draws the viewer under her spell – or rather, under the spell of the work.

Miriam Pietrangeli-Ankermann, Münchner Merkur, 2015 (translated from German)

Riemerling Studios: Petra Amtsberg Hoffmann has created a colony where creativity lives

Hohenbrunn – The Diakonie conference centre in Hohenbrunn was designed as a place of quiet contemplation. Many years ago the enclave at the edge of the forest, next to the Lore-Malsch-Haus, lost its religious purpose and fell into a deep sleep – until Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann filled it with new life and colour-explosive large-format compositions. The Gräfelfing artist bought the property, including its chapel, three years ago and has realised her dream of an artists’ colony with currently eight studios and rehearsal rooms. Outwardly, the building with the charm of a 1960s parish house has hardly changed; inside, however, it has. The first period after moving in was spent freeing the three floors of the Riemerling Studios from cobwebs and slowly transforming them.

In the corridors and their long, narrow perspectives the eye finds enough calm to jump from picture to picture and to pause in front of an unobtrusive background of brick or lime-white, sometimes unplastered walls. Nothing and no one disturbs the viewing here. The creatives at the Riemerling Studios include Richard Deichl, Tom Eicher, Eva Kiss, Katja Ling-Zeggio and Geo Vidal. Each has a private area from which their creative energy can unfold freely.

Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann studied architecture; she can use these professional strengths for painting and skilfully combine the two. Figurative drawing provides the basis, the plan for a fully worked-out painting – but it must never become a closed, repetitive process. Amtsberg-Hoffmann’s artistic curiosity keeps finding new approaches. At the International Summer Academy in Salzburg she was strongly influenced by Norbert Bisky and followed his advice to seek her expression in large formats on canvas. Small, instinctively drawn sketches and portrait miniatures, which she conjures up from memory, do not contradict this way of working. Large compositions are developed from them, too, arriving at a new statement through several abstract layers of acrylic. Unusual perspectives help during the painting process: the canvas is turned upside down so as not to allow routine. The result is sometimes several square metres in size, and the white gaps in the colour space refer back to the original sketch. Nothing is chosen at random; everything may be reinterpreted.

And there is more than enough space for this in the former conference centre. It seems like one single large exhibition space – interrupted by doors behind which ideas run riot on easels, between vices on workbenches and in hobby corners. The studios serve as places of retreat; two bands in the basement need take no account of sensitive ears behind their soundproofed walls. In summer there are barbecues in the atrium and informal philosophising about art. The children of the forest kindergarten romping in the garden are no disturbance: as a mother, Petra Amtsberg-Hoffmann is grateful for a background noise she was used to for many years. It has not harmed her artistic inspiration.

Marc Oliver Schreib, Münchner Merkur, after the Open Studios 2017 (translated from German)