2023-09-08 16:25:30
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Volker Steinbacher in the Frankfurt gallery “Das Bilderhaus”, where his exhibition “Unstern” can currently be seen. © Monika Müller
The printmaker Volker Steinbacher wants to make his artistic work affordable for many people. Activism runs through his life.
The round celestial bodies have very different characters. The iron star glows from the inside and is regarding to burst with its red heat particles on a yellow background. The planetary rabble P10, on the other hand, looks cool but tempting with its islands of dark blue in the black. And then the long, flat landscapes. Their colors seem to fray upwards and get lost in streaks of mist: Volker Steinbacher’s prints open up a wide range of associations for the viewer. Invite you to think and empathize. For almost 40 years, the Frankfurt artist has been expanding the design space of printmaking with patient creativity. Students from China, South Korea and Russia come to the lecturer at the University of Design in Offenbach to learn from him. He set an international example with the “Path of Stones” campaign: he and others painted eyes on 500 particles of lime or basalt and distributed them worldwide.
The 66-year-old is currently taking stock of his artistic work in the “bilderhaus” gallery in Frankfurt’s Nordend. A rare opportunity to meet and talk to the restless traveler who is currently setting off once more, this time to the European South. He sees his travels as an opportunity to learn to “put the Western perspective into perspective.” His criticism is directed at the art business with its exorbitant prices (and costs): “I can work without a lot of money.” Just as Steinbacher appears modest and reserved, speaks quietly, but sometimes with a wink, with self-irony.
We are sitting in the late summer warmth in the garden behind the gallery, at a table made from an old sewing machine. And talk regarding a youth in Neu-Isenburg, at the Buchenbusch, not far from the forest. There Steinbacher, the son of a seamstress and a surveying engineer, grew up “in small circumstances” in a two-family house. In 1969, the first Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt not only issued the motto “We want to dare to be more democratic,” but “advancement through education” was also possible in the social-liberal era. And so Volker attended high school, driven by his parents’ wish that he become an engineer or natural scientist. They supported their son as best they might.
Of course, he watched the first manned moon landing of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969 on the black and white images on a small television. “I was woken up specifically in the morning.” And a year later, the teenager visited the planetarium in the German Museum in Munich. For the 13-year-old, this confrontation with space shaped his life. “I might see the moon craters, a few star clusters and the moons of Jupiter.” Soon there was a permanently installed telescope in the garden behind the house in Neu-Isenburg. “But it wasn’t the scientific side that fascinated me, I was interested in the beauty of the celestial bodies and the universe.” Decades later he would reflect it in his graphics.
Volker painted his first pictures at the age of sixteen. Surrealist paintings “in the style of Max Ernst and Salvador Dali” were created. Steinbacher was determined: he would take this path. He packed a folder with application papers and submitted them to the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. In 1976 the art school accepted him. Two semesters of basic studies with Thomas Bayrle, already an icon at the time.
But the Städelschule was dominated by political action art, photography and video works. “I was very out of place with my painting; surrealism was something historical,” remembers the artist. He failed the intermediate exam, but received a “grace semester”. Steinbacher’s rescue was guest lecturer Christiane Maether. The painter and draftsman encouraged him to work on paper. “I never left paper once more, I stuck with it, even with my printing work.”
Steinbacher raves regarding the paper: “It has no volume, it is thin, you can give it very variable formats.”
In 1978, the Städel students went on an excursion to New York and met the US sculptor George Segal, who caused a sensation with his plaster sculptures. “Everything was different following that.” The young German visitor was fascinated by the free use of the material and the shapes. Back at the Städelschule he went to the class of Johannes Schreiter, who was promoting contemporary stained glass at the time. Steinbacher stayed there until he completed his studies in 1982. “Then things got complicated,” he says briefly. “I had no perspective, I didn’t know what to do next.”
To person
Volker Steinbacher was born in Neu-Isenburg in 1957. From 1976 to 1982 he studied painting and free graphics at the Städel Art Academy in Frankfurt am Main, in the classes of Thomas Bayrle, Christiane Maether and Johannes Schreiter.
1984 Work as a theater painter at the municipal theaters in Frankfurt. 1984 to 1985 studied stage design at the University of Design in Offenbach with Klaus Gelhaar. Since 1988 numerous solo exhibitions in Germany. 1994/1995 scholarship for printmaking in the Kätelhörn copperplate printing workshops. Since 2011 he has been a lecturer in free printmaking at the University of Design in Offenbach.
“Unstar” is the name of the current exhibition by the artist Volker Steinbacher in the gallery Das Bilderhaus, Hermannstraße 41, Frankfurt am Main. The exhibition can be seen until September 24th, the finissage begins on that day at 4 p.m. Opening hours are Monday to Wednesday 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. The gallery is closed Thursday to Saturday. Contact Jutta Uhlendorf-Baier, gallery owner, jutta.baier@das-bilderhaus.de jg
But there were other influences. The child already accompanied the parents to the Easter March for Peace and Disarmament. The beautifully designed posters fascinated the boy. But he soon became occupied with the political content. The fight once morest the war that the USA waged in Vietnam. Again, images that stuck: “The photo of a Vietnamese man whose stomach had been slit open so that his intestines were spilling out.” The demonstrations once morest the stationing of nuclear weapons in Germany. And the young man, like many of his generation in the Rhine-Main area, was caught up in a movement: the protest once morest the construction of runway 18 West at the Rhine-Main Airport. In the fall and winter of 1981, resistance peaked; a village of huts was created in the Flörsheim Forest, which was to be cleared for the airport expansion. “I was often in the Hüttendorf on Sundays, I was there at every demonstration,” said Steinbacher.
He was convinced that the airport’s growth was ecologically absurd and that it had to be prevented. “We had the feeling that we might really make a difference.” But the young people’s hopes were bitterly disappointed. The police crushed the resistance in the Flörsheim Forest and cleared the hut village. Even a demonstration with 250,000 people in Wiesbaden changed nothing. “It was a big disappointment.” At the same time, my studies at the Städelschule came to an end. “I became incredibly politically disillusioned.” There were other setbacks. Ernst Jünger, criticized by many as an intellectual pioneer of German fascism, received the Frankfurt Goethe Prize in 1982.
As with many of his generation in the Rhine-Main area, these experiences led to a violent reaction for Steinbacher. “All my political dreams were shattered, I retreated into the artistic.” In 1984, Runway 18 West was opened. With cash from his grandmother, the young artist set off on a second trip to the USA at the same time. He took a limousine from New York to Phoenix, Arizona, took the Greyhound bus to San Francisco and Los Angeles, and immersed himself in the art scene. It was a tipping point in life. “I might have stayed there.” But following two months I returned to Frankfurt. Engagement at the municipal theaters as a theater painter. Steinbacher worked for famous productions: “The Trojans” by the opera director Ruth Berghaus and “La Bohême” by Volker Schlöndorff.
Another tipping point. “They were looking for someone to manage the painting room for the stage sets.” But following a year he quit his permanent position. “I didn’t want to implement other people’s designs.” An unsettled life began. “Two nights a week driving a taxi in Frankfurt, the rest of the time working artistically.” The artistic freedom weighed a lot for the soon to be 30-year-old. For a few years he supported himself with painting and collages. The artist’s brother Martin Kippenberger, who is a gallery owner in Cologne, represented Steinbacher. “There was a good time, but it didn’t last.”
It was only printmaking that brought the artistic breakthrough. Steinbacher decided to combine two previously separate processes. “Once upon a time, the design of the printing plate was the responsibility of the artist.” Producing the print was then left to the printer. “I decided: I’m going to do both.” From the choice of paper to the artistic design to the printing, everything was in his hands. In 1994/95 he refined his technique during two scholarships in the copperplate printing workshops at Möhnesee in North Rhine-Westphalia.
His artistic universe slowly grew. In his essay “Printmaking as a Medium” from 2016, the artist later described what fascinates him regarding printmaking to this day: “The risk, the irreversibility of the artistic decision.” Not surprisingly, celestial bodies appeared in his works. Round shapes. He called one of his well-known series “Oort Cloud”. Discovered by the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort in 1950, this is the name given to a collection of astronomical objects in the outermost region of the solar system. In other words: the door is wide open to imagination. And so the works of the “Oort Cloud” took on countless colors and atmospheres.
It was similar with the flat, colored landscape panoramas, which incorporated the artist’s impressions from trips to Russia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Armenia. In 2003, a few days before the start of the Iraq War, he and other painters launched an action in the small mountain village of Mirabel in the French Ardèche that can be read as political. The friends painted 500 stones, mostly with eyes, and began distributing them around the world over the years. “We wanted to occupy the world by peaceful means.” One stone even ended up on the ISS space station, one found its way onto the research ship “Polarstern”, others came to Sri Lanka, Malawi, Guatemala and Oman.
It was an action typical of the artist’s understanding. Unlike painting and sculpture, which often attracted well-heeled clients, collectors and patrons, printmaking has developed “into an almost popular medium”. In this way, Volker Steinbacher believes, it is possible to “make art affordable for a broader section of the population.” It was only later that he settled down, so to speak, and took on a lectureship in free printmaking at the University of Design in Offenbach. Retirement is due there in spring 2024. But that just means: time for new trips, new work.
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