WEDEL.- The artist Leon Löwentraut (born 1998) will be awarded the Ernst Barlach Prize 2023 for Fine Arts on Friday, December 01, 2023. The prize has been awarded by the Ernst Barlach Society Hamburg since 1995 in order to draw attention to particularly innovative artistic positions. The jury chaired by Dr. Jürgen Doppelstein, Museum Director and Chairman of the Ernst Barlach Society, voted unanimously in favor of the 25-year-old Leon Löwentraut.

At the same time as the award, the Ernst Barlach Gesellschaft Hamburg is honoring the artist with a retrospective exhibition that will provide an insight into Leon Löwentraut's pictorial worlds until 28 January 2024. The museum is showing a cross-section of his work on three floors - a total of more than 70 works - paintings, graphic editions, sculptures and charcoal drawings - are on display.

Dr. Jürgen Doppelstein explains: "Leon Löwentraut's works and his strongly media-based public communication have received little attention from traditional art critics. We are of the opinion that it is time for a change of perspective." With regard to the relevance of Löwentraut's work, he emphasizes: "Leon Löwentraut shows modern man in all his isolation and fragmentation. And at the same time, he turns this human being into a great mystery. His depictions of robotic figures seem like messages from a distant, mysterious world. They are apocalyptic and utopian at the same time, they oscillate between gestural, representational, abstract, ornamental and provocatively color-explosive.

With its contradictory promise of uniqueness, Löwentraut stages his art as part of virtual reality. At the same time, he exaggerates the public nature of the private sphere in live acts and social media campaigns. He plays with the idea that the supposedly unique, genuine and authentic is itself only a construction and that his art alone is perhaps a last, desirable shelter. In it, the figures often appear distracted and fleeting, grotesque and clumsy, fragile and delicate and not infrequently fearful.

Löwentraut's figures are trapped in a flood of images, signs and symbols that restrict their ability to move and escape. They often seem like masked lonely people in a crowded room. This feeling of loneliness in the midst of overcrowding and unmanageability is the starting point for Leon Löwentraut's artistic work." Doppelstein emphasizes: "In this way, he touches a nerve of the present and inspires younger people in particular with his art."

He continues: "Of course, Löwentraut is also steeped in an artistic and aesthetic heritage that all young artists have to face up to. There's always a tradition that comes through, the only question is how to not only overcome traditions, but how to reinterpret them.

The Abstract Expressionism of Willem de Kooning, for example, was characterized in particular by a gestural-expressive style. His works were always an exploration of abstraction and the constantly changing arrangement of human figures in the process of dissolution. He elevated the incompleteness of the individual picture to an important principle. And so Leon Löwentraut's pictures sometimes appear strangely unfinished, often sketchy, as if interrupted in the middle of the painting process, suggesting that the artist will perhaps continue working on the work tomorrow or leave the completion entirely to the viewers themselves."

Leon Löwentraut

Leon Löwentraut was born in Kaiserslautern in 1998. The artist has studios near Düsseldorf and in Portugal and now lives mainly in Europe's westernmost country. Since 2018, one of Leon Löwentraut's paintings has adorned the lobby of the NRW state parliament. Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences awarded the Düsseldorf painter a lectureship in the Virtual Design course for the winter semester 2021/2022. Topic "Future Exhibition Design". The aim was to develop intelligent staging formats for the art sector in order to make analog art more tangible with digital possibilities. The jointly developed project "Volar" has now been awarded gold by the Art Directors Club (ADC).

Background: The ADC competition honors the most creative works in German-speaking countries every year. Leon Löwentraut sees painting as an artistically exploratory process of discovery: the result is open.