The first exhibition at Meyer Riegger’s new premises in Seoul is dedicated to the work of Horst Antes. On display are the artist’s house paintings from 1986 to 2023 as well as a date painting from 2015/2016.

After the Nazi era, it was necessary to find new ways of portraying human figures, which is why the visual language of Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism initially dominated in Western Europe and the USA after the Second World War. By the 1960s, however, even abstract painting was in crisis, and so the New Figuration movement emerged in response, with Horst Antes regarded as one of its co-founders. New Figuration recognised the transformation of our image of humanity brought about by dictatorship, war and technology.

While Antes began his career as an abstract painter, he soon came to view space in abstract painting as ‘lifeless, inhuman and uninhabitable’. In his early work from 1958 onwards, he started to develop biomorphic forms out of his freer colour compositions. Eventually, human body parts and figures emerged too. A specific artistic figure was created: the “Kopffüßler” (literally ‘head-footer’). The head, with arms attached, is usually mounted on a pair of legs without a torso. With this figure, Antes had found his first archetype; it subsequently appeared in his paintings for two decades and was presented at every major exhibition during this period – the Venice Biennale and three documenta exhibitions. The art critic Donald Kuspit considers Antes’s “Kopffüßler” as the ‘total antithesis to the realistic and pseudo-tough Nazi figure’.

On the one hand, Antes was working on an alternative vision to the depiction of humans that had been instilled in him since his youth in southern Germany; on the other hand, he had always been interested in devising monumental, timeless forms. This quest not only led the artist to his “Kopffüßler”, but also to his house paintings from 1986 onwards and to the date paintings three years later. Antes continues to create house and date paintings to this day.

With their straightforward architectural design, Antes’s houses are reminiscent of the casa colonica – old Italian farmhouses in a classic Romanesque style. Since the mid-1990s, Antes has lived in the small Italian valley of Sicellino, where he sees simple houses like this every day. Without windows or doors, Antes’s houses seem as inaccessible as temples. There is no threshold between inside and out. Although houses are often seen as a symbol of community and warmth, Antes does not ‘build’ his houses to provide shelter. Rather, just like the “Kopffüßler”, they are artistic figures, abstract symbols of themselves – monumental, timeless archetypes.

Houses and heads are not only often the first things that children paint; both forms encase people – and their thoughts. Antes’s mostly windowless and doorless houses are impenetrable, just like foreheads that you cannot see behind. Nevertheless, something is going on behind them, and the certainty of this, this vitality of becoming within, is primarily established in Antes’s work through his mastery of paint as a material; mixed with sawdust, it has a very dense appearance. At times it seems as if the painted surfaces are not wood or linen, but perhaps even the wall of a house. The materiality of the paint is also emphasised by the reduced nature of his forms. Antes often chooses the colour black for his house paintings. Despite the density of this colour, it does not result in a depressing heaviness, but rather a vibrancy that alludes to the invisible vitality of becoming within. The poet Joachim Sartorius even situates Antes’s use of colour in the art-historical lineage of Malevich, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, describing his works as the “next steps in the development of contemporary painting.”

We humans not only live in our heads and in our houses, but in time, too. Antes’s date paintings also feature simple forms with a dense materiality. Day after day, Antes layers the Arabic numerals used to indicate the date in Europe in the day-month-year format. This creates a ‘sludge of numbers’ (Horst Antes) that makes deciphering the dates impossible. While Antes clearly and meticulously lists every date that he has painted on the back of the plywood or the canvases, the numbers on the front blur over time like memories.

Horst Antes