Karl Hagemeister - Das Licht, das ewig wechselt
Wienand Verlag
“…das Licht, das ewig wechselt” is a tribute and compendium of Karl Hagemeister’s oeuvre.
Now, chances are that the villages in the German region of Brandenburg, which is where Karl Hagemeister grew up and remained focussed on with his artistic endeavours, is all Greek to you.
However, the impressive way and dedication with which Hagemeister captured and portrayed natural phenomena catapulted him to the forefront to the German impressionist movement, where his position as a luminary remains undisputed until the present day.
With his credo being that you need to surround yourself with the subject matter you are depicting, he did not create his paintings from the removed confines of his atelier but from the midst of nature, in a bid to be deliberately impacted and affected first hand by the same challenging phenomena and adverse conditions he was depicting.
There is a quality to the resulting realism that gets under your skin – literally.
Hagemeister channels his alchemy in a way that eliminates distance and makes movements, seasons and even temperatures palpable, e.g. ripples on water and surfaces; the interplay, projections and impact of light and shadows and the way wind plays with everything in its path.
With immediacy at the core at any given point, Hagemeister’s approach is clearly informed by the endeavour to break down barriers instead of elevating art into abstract academic spheres. An approach that is further cemented by his connection to his natural habitat, which he ever really left.
As the title of this tome suggests, i.e. what roughly translated to “…the ever changing light”, the paintings depicted show nuances at a level that do not only please aesthetically but make one reassess and revisit how one perceives natural phenomena and how they impact one’s outlook on life.
