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Born in Bad Cannstatt nr. Stuttgart in 1941, Wolfgang Maria Ohlhäuser trained as a graphic designer between 1956 and 1959. Subsequently he worked as a freelance graphic designer as of 1967 and started producing works using the painting techniques of the Old Masters in 1975. In 1982, he received a grant from the Baden-Württemberg Art Foundation in Stuttgart. He has taught intermittently at the College of Fine Arts in Bangkok and the Goethe Institute in Katmandu, Nepal since 1993. A background that is not immediately apparent when you first encounter this quiet, rather shy man. However, a conversation with Ohlhäuser soon reveals a high reflective mind with a good portion of irony and mischievousness, characteristics that the artist in all probability developed in his youth and that were no doubt strengthened by his subsequent autodidactic studies. Both, perhaps, contribute to the intensity of his artistic oeuvre, which ensures that his pictures are always essentially colorful in tone as well as lending them something brooding and constructed. This intensity has become rare amongst contemporary action painters, a group with which he has, to put it facetiously, only his beard in common. When seen at exhibitions, his works have nothing lightweight, instant or frivolous about them. Everything is conditioned by the slow genesis of the works, a process which lasts until they have developed into a second, more sensitively handled world of images.
As an artist, Wolfgang Maria Ohlhäuser has his roots in old painting traditions, traditions he follows by selecting, emphasizing and developing individual components in his own, utterly consistent way. Ohlhäuser blends the tectonic color-shape structure of the Constructivists with the intensive colors of the Surreal Expressionists - until he reaches a point where the two become a single entity, highlighting the image as a color construct and a color event. Ground and subject matter, color expanses and the shapes of the colors have been put together in such a way that the grounding and the landscape or the grounding and the figure, the main shape and the subsidiary shapes defined by the former, the color modulations and the shape structures all blend into one large-scale event of resonant color. Despite the importance of the psychological statement he wishes to convey, nothing is lost in the process, and despite all the alienation, for example in the landscapes under water, Ohlhäuser never loses his direct contact with nature. Each motif takes shape via the hard, labor-intensive painting process in several layers, which lends his images the hovering enchantment of the ideal, even when the artist consciously focuses on the endangered or even the already unsightly locations of this Earth. For Ohlhäuser has decided that the secret of real art is that the latter always has been concerned with, and always still is concerned with overcoming problems, to be more specific, the current problems people generally face.
For example, Mediaeval art was concerned with treating and portraying the Christian doctrine of salvation and, in this connection, with discovering maxims to help alleviate the burden of man's life on earth by focusing on the life beyond. The main, central aims of the Italian Renaissance were, firstly, to revive the image of mankind promulgated by Classical Antiquity and, secondly, an attendant aim was to encourage the individual to focus on this life and consequently to free himself. The same is true of the ability to use scientific thought to explain the world around us, an ability which resulted from and was only made possible by the latter movement. And of the realization that art is more than invention and discovery, more than craftsmanship. That the artist's work does not detract from nature in any way, but that he produces something that had not existed previously by means of an act of creation involving media. Produces a work of art, in fact, and with it a little cosmos, not of nature, but in addition to nature, in addition to God's creation, if you like. This is why a work of art is unique. In contrast to a scientific discovery or an invention it cannot be copied or repeated, but is simply unique, original.!
Thus, the pictorial work of art, which has its starting point in the energies of the human soul and the human intellect, is the result of a particular type of conception. And indeed, the specific conception demonstrated by the artist in particular consists in achieving an inspired combination, an optical unity in pictorial form, of something figurative with a free or figurative shape that intuitively matches the former, producing a meaningful entity, a totality!
Now, in West Europe, in present-day Europe, art can be approached in two ways. The first way is to become involved in the business of art. This is a fundamental decision and does not depend on where the artist works and how much he produces. With regard to the profession this means that the artist paints as much as he can and exhibits as often as possible and wherever he can. His avowed aim is to become as popular and in as great demand as possible within the social framework he hopes to fill. He looks for a social location where his painting can earn him the recognition and approval of his environment.
The other possibility is as follows. An artist can, like Wolfgang Maria Ohlhäuser, view painting as a purely personal activity, pursued out of a need to grow and to gain in intellectual substance in the process. This need presupposes an inner necessity. The need, for example - or, to put it more precisely, the inner compulsion - to travel to Nepal or to Thailand, to become interested in the religions of the Far East and then to return home and to manifest one's preoccupations by making a statement through the medium of visual art. Using these pictorial statements to alert one's fellow men to the destruction of the environment in one's own country. To recognize that because of the misinterpretation of the Christian doctrine make the Earth bow down to you the countryside, the rivers and seas in the western world are almost dead, whereas in the East, under the influence of religions that, unlike modern Christianity, have penetrated the peoples' daily lives and issued rules that are still followed and lived by, they are still alive. In places where, for the Celts, the Teutons and the Romans, the fountain nymphs and river gods once lived, where, as Goethe put it, the blessed spirits hover over the waters, nobody would pollute a spring, a stream or a river with poisons, destroy a landscape in order to maximize profits or desolate towns and villages. Particularly since all life springs from the water.
Consequently, Ohlhäuser's need, his inner compulsion to paint is not, in the first instance, directed outwards, but is completely self-referential. This type of artistic endeavor is one way of coming to terms with life. It is, if you understand me correctly, in the positive sense of the word, naive! It has no hidden intention and can be seen as an act of individuation. In the sense of the philosophy of Friedrich Schiller, it is, in the first instance, a form of activity without purpose. This purpose only comes into being after the image itself, for although the adequate artist, working as the medium, can do what he likes, he cannot, as Schopenhauer put it, want what he likes. What he wants determines both his unconscious and his subconscious. And if an artist paints in this way, he develops with and through his activities. Painting and images become his fate! The kind of pictures that we have before us are expressions of life and ways of objectifying life. They belong to the living spirit because they are genuine and direct witnesses and reports of existence.
I cannot avoid pointing out this difference, which should be understood in general terms. For it is between these two diametrically opposite standpoints regarding the practice of modern pictorial art that both the many hybrid forms of the two approaches and contemporary artists are to be found. The majority of painters either adhere directly to the first approach, or at least follow it closely. This attitude is understandable in human terms and is no more than natural. After all, the easier way of life consists of assuming a role, playing one's part as well as possible and ending up by identifying with it. Anyway, only a few people are in a position to make the course of their lives into a means of justifying their existences. Most people start their lives unquestioningly and simply carry on living them until they are over.
A path following this role is also typical of the pattern of life demonstrated by the vast majority of members of the painting guild. Their avowed aim is to make a name for themselves, to play as dominant a role as possible in their various artistic associations in order to be able to exercise power within the relevant organ and, last but not least, to be buried with the association's flag flying at the head of a long funeral procession. And not only does this depiction characterize the outward appearance of the progress of the life of a modern bourgeois individual. Above all, what it is indicative of is such a person's inner frame of mind. And the reason for this is that the typical bourgeois West European prioritizes social recognition.
The only type of person to question this way of life which seeks power and prestige from social position is the independent individualist answerable only to himself. Such a person is the imaginative realist Wolfgang Maria Ohlhäuser. Ohlhäuser is vulnerable because he faces -or rather confronts - life openly. He considers himself to have been cast into his own existence. He sees participating and recognizing, displaying an alert metaphysical conscience and sense of responsibility vis-à-vis the noumenal as a binding duty. He places no value on the purely material. This kind of individualist does not need to be aware of all the convolutions of his own spiritual condition. After all, everybody inevitably follows the dictates of his own real will. And whether he has reflected upon the matter or not is irrelevant. All that anybody who follows his intellect or possesses a lively intellect wants is for his live to have meaning. How he achieves this and what means he uses to implement it, to breathe life into it, depends on each individual's own special talents and his own special gifts. Whatever the case, in their striving towards a joint goal, the true individuals always meet. And upon this goal the philosophers, the poets, the musicians and the pictorial artists all agree.
The path from bourgeois role-playing, where just about everybody necessarily starts out and which Ohlhäuser abandoned two decades ago, towards self-determined and finally fully developed free individualism is multifarious. Some people find it easy and start out early on. Others find it more difficult to escape from a predetermined situation. Most people start thinking about themselves very late in the day. Some even only embark upon the path to self-knowledge shortly before their death. However, it is never too late to confront life. When exactly an individual is confronted by the question of himself, his life and his existence is determined by fate. Many people are touched only marginally by the question. A few, such as painter Ohlhäuser, are so deeply affected that they, like he, start to act as soon as they realize the situation. In Ohlhäuser's case, this means that, by translating an alien culture into a metaphysical pictorial language that we West Europeans can understand, the artist holds up a mirror to our faces. Challenges us, using a the meta-language of Fantastic Realism directed not at our intellect but at our emotions, our spiritual powers, to think about ourselves and remember our duties as human beings to our fellow men and to nature.
Today, when we talk about painting, we no longer, as we did earlier, consider the work or the activity to consists simply in the mere act of painting in the narrower sense of the word. What I am referring to is what is known as the simple handicraft. In the age of industry and particularly in the age of photography this has become a marginal phenomenon socially speaking. What serious painter would make it his profession to produce an imperfect reproduction of something that cannot be improved upon? Since, however, at the same time Ohlhäuser has clearly recognized that anybody who has opted for using painting to bring a specific social concern to the attention of the general public needs to be a complete master of the techniques his painting style requires. Secondly, with his Ars Fantastica, this style of painting characterized by Fantastic Realism, with its cultural roots in the only type of art for a long time (amongst the short-lived styles of art to be found in our century) that has remained alive and continued to develop, Surrealism, and its latest offshoot, Psychorealism, Ohlhäuser has not only adopted a perfect technique in the style of the old masters which is also appropriate to the substance of his pictures. Also, as an honest artist, he has not disguised where his roots are: in Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breughel, Albrecht Altdorfer, Caspar David Friedrich and Max Ernst.
Yet at the same time as an artistically genuine contemporary painter, Ohlhäuser is free of idiosyncrasies and independent of the thematic constraints of the past. In reality he is, in his own particularly way, a poet. He accepts responsibility for his work. He uses the pictures he paints, which can be divided into two types, fantastic pictures and visions or travel souvenirs, both transposed into other realities, in the same way as a writer uses his pen. The ultimate aim of his work is not to be able to show off a piece of handicraft in the style of the old masters, but rather to illustrate the allegory of his imagination. In this, the sole purpose of this perfect item of handicraft is to express his ideas as vividly as possible. Ohlhäuser's self-appointed task is nothing less than to bring forth a meaningful creation of the mind.
In terms of the number of years he has lived, Wolfgang Maria Ohlhäuser is approaching the beginning of the last third of human life. And yet: when has an artist reached his goal? In my opinion, every time he produces a successful, poetic meaningful creation of the mind. During this process each step forwards into the unknown requires him to hold his ground, to hold his ground once again in the territory he has already claimed as his own. Working, creating is a lifelong task for the man whose vocation is that of an artist. Wherever the focus may lie in his future treatment of the problems of our times, and this is something we cannot know, one thing has been certain since I opened one of his exhibitions two years ago, that there are signs of a continuing search, signs that allow us to hope for a great deal of new material! Thus, the real aim of life for artists such as Wolfgang Maria Ohlhäuser is nothing more than the path of life itself. Or, as the Tao put it: The goal is the way!
Prof. Manfred Tripps, 1995
Member of the German National Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM)
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