Kunstverein KunstHaus Potsdam

                                                                   Martin Engelman´s Graphic Oevere, 30.03.–07.05.2006 

Sensual pleasure

... it is intriguing to see how Martin Engelman captures in his works the substance of a multi-layered reality through degrees of abstraction. The exhibition shows almost fifty sheets from his extensive graphic oeuvre. The artistic quality and force of the prints is founded on their sound craftsmanship, which only allows mastering the intended expression.

Already during his education, Engelman, who was born in South Holland in 1924, specialised in printmaking. Later, as a graphic designer, he worked in close collaboration with experienced printmakers, so that, when he subsequently became a free-lance artist, he was in perfect command of the spectrum of print graphics. In 1963, Gallery Brusberg presented him for the first time in Germany, one year later he took part in documenta III.

L’art pour l’art was not his mission. Whenever he personally experienced injustice in his time and society, he did not remain passive, from the German occupation of the Netherlands to the Vietnam war. He passed away unexpectedly in Munich in 1992. Engelman lived in the arts of his time, but he also sought to examine things past, for example Hieronymus Bosch. This can be felt and seen in the selection shown in Potsdam. There are his head people, which are constructed through the fantasy of forms and colours. A threat is being articulated. They all have their faces, even in the boldest form. You see heads, and heads again in the Kunsthaus, black-and-white, coloured, flat-and-edged, swinging. This is not based on an ambition to anatomical correctness. This is about the adventure of transcending the mere physiognomy by means of formal elements, and introducing a connectedness in time. It is not the anatomy that has to be right, but the image.

Engelman’s colours give sensual pleasure, from the most delicate pastel shades, which never appear undecided, to the luscious colour tones especially in the large-format woodcuts. 

Two of his seascapes, “Près de la mer” and “Segeltörn” particularly stand out in how they ingeniously capture reality in abstraction. Engelman comes from the figurative. Here, however, sensual impressions, physiological und psychological states have become image, compressed into a brilliant canon of colours and forms. You experience a fascinating realism in this abstraction gained from many-faceted experiences of life and of art, a realism that resolutely broke free from the constrictions of the mere natural model and that provides, for a diversity of beholders, broad access to the substantial core of the images.

Arno Neumann

(quote from: Märkische Allgemeine, Potsdam, 8/9 April 2006)