Shirt pictures. Paintings by Albert Cüppers

In Cooperation with the St. Matthäus-Kirche Foundation, Cultural Foundation of the Protestant Church in Berlin-Brandenburg and the Villa Roth Museum, Burgrieden-Rot

Albert Cüppers has been working on the subject of the SHIRT, an anonymous garment tailored to the individual, since the early 1980s.

He asked himself whether there is an approach to the human form by means of abstraction, without letting the individual appear claiming his own image. The path to increasing distance from the object was mapped out and the strict adherence to flatness was the consequence. Parallel to the reduction of pictorial content, it became increasingly clear to Cüppers that a work project with a wide range of variations was in the making. Cyclical work allows the essential elements to be summarized and a theme to be explored in depth: for example, the richness of color and the canon of forms can be depicted as models.

The individual depiction of the shirt, although symbolic, is nevertheless an attempt to approach it in the awareness that spit images cannot be derived from one's own mirror image, that HIS image cannot be grasped from ours: HE can neither be depicted not be named. The absence of a portrait and the withdrawal of the representational leads to a different way of looking at the image. The colorfulness or the relationship of contrasts to one another lends the painting its own individuality and distinctiveness: a different pictorial code is being discovered.