Premiere for my Jakob Böhme meadow in the House of Photography
Premiere for my Jakob Böhme meadow in the House of Photography in Burghausen. For the first time I show my new group of works inspired by the German mystic and theosophist Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) in my exhibition Gentleness in nature, a quiet calm.
A very challenging and complex task also for me, because Jakob Böhme is not easy to understand, not to say, he is very difficult to understand at all, or even not at all. I have been studying his writings for a little more than two years. It is not so that one thinks, now I have some time and take out a book, read Jakob Böhme. Here I would like to refer to a very apt quotation:
The writer Hermann Hesse said at the beginning of the 20th century about Jakob Böhme: "He is not only difficult to read, just as Kant, for example, is difficult to read in many chapters. He is not to be read at all, if the attitude is missing."
And anyone who wants to delve into his work will be drawn into this struggle. He will experience being pulled down, as if by a vortex, into a still dark chaos. He 'reads' a book in which all existing concepts and images acquire a different, previously unknown meaning, because he reads in a living book. Therefore, whoever says that he understands Boehme (as one understands a non-fiction author, for example) is fooling himself and others. He is mistaken, because Boehme forces man to an intervening self-exploration.
Jacob Boehme shakes the foundations of accepted knowledge and tests its authenticity. Parroting him and quoting him is not enough. Every quotation challenges the spirit from which the Goerlitzer spoke, worked and wrote. That's why 'Boehme' and 'noncommittal' are a sharp contrast. His work is spiritual dynamite. The explosion it causes continues to have an effect in shock waves, in generations, cultures, and in everyone who 'encounters' Böhme.
That is why the transformation of his words into a pictorial cycle is a first beginning that will surely accompany me throughout my life. I hope my meadow inspires you too, no matter what your thoughts are.
Premiere for my Jakob Böhme meadow in the House of Photography in Burghausen. Gentleness in nature a quiet calm.