COLOGNE.- Herbert Warmuth’s works question the very essence of painting. They examine the interplay between color, medium, material, and environment, revealing how these elements relate to one another. What initially presents itself as a Bild in Warmuth's work is, in truth, a contingent state, an unfolding situation—capturing the tension between visible order and the movement that has occurred. In this way, color itself becomes a tangible force: it pushes, shapes, deforms, and elevates the surface.

Warmuth’s acrylic paintings, framed through and behind Plexiglass, present tranquil panels in a range of tones—from soft, subtle shades to more intense hues. Their mirror-like surfaces reflect not only the surrounding space but also the viewer, creating an almost sealed effect. The crack running across the surface arises from an injury, a rupture—where color presses through, breaking free. This fracture is no mere accident; it is a deliberate disturbance, a disruption of idealized perfection that exposes a moment of vulnerability.

“The result is a painting that creates a wound which only itself can heal.”

Yet, this is not just a fleeting rupture. The painting reveals itself beyond the glass, subtly shimmering from its depths – delicate, yet resolute. In some works, color gently shines through from the edges, seeping into the composition with quiet insistence. It appears like an impulse from the periphery that unfolds quietly but with impact.

The breach transforms the field into an opening. From this rupture, colour unfurls organically, generating bodies and vectors that chart the painting’s trajectories through space.

Warmuth conceives images and colour as spatial forces. He lets colour expand—out of an object, from within an object—into the total image that unfolds with and within the surrounding space.

Space and image define one another, sustain one another, recognise one another, question one another. The painting questions the space that enfolds it: how far may I extend within you?

The space questions the painting in return: how much do you claim of me—and how far do you enter into me?

A breach reveals what once lay hidden behind or beneath, drawing it forward. It enters into dialogue with the space before, behind, and beyond it. It bridges space and time, and the transformations they entail.

A breach does not merely expose what lies beneath; it testifies that something had to rupture for the concealed to come forth. It shows what was hidden: something that lay dormant, waiting to surface the moment it was given the chance — something that required the breaking of glass.

The glass reflects; the color emerges—not only as a counterforce, but as a companion in the unfolding field.

Warmuth's works detach themselves from material hierarchies.

In front of and behind, the supporting and the visible stand side by side on an equal footing. The glass holds back the color, binds it to its origin, but at the same time it firmly holds it, frames it, honors it. Just as the color respects the covering of the glass. The picture is a reflecting rectangle.

As the crack in the pane becomes stronger, ramifications, veins grow out of it and create new paths through which color can flow. For cracks are extensions of a world. They do not simply appear; they assert themselves. They stand as manifest witnesses to shock, tremor, eruption — initiators of a confrontation between what lies beneath and what lies above.

What force, what latent energy set the crack in motion? A breach is separating and opening.

A sign that something has broken — or that something has expanded. Both at once. It transforms destruction into expansion and growth.

In Herbert Warmuth’s painting, the boundaries between space and painting dissolve; what is contained and what is open become indistinguishable. Perception no longer fixates solely on the surface but unfolds as part of an ongoing process. A shift from inside to outside, from control to contingency.

What emerges is self-generated, arising from within itself.

Front and back, glass and color, they condition and complete one another. Distinct yet interconnected, they yield and respond to each other through form and shape. Surface and color carry and support each other, entwining in a dynamic interplay.

They exist as high and low, front, and back – together, behind, and through.

Elisa Mosch

Herbert Warmuth (*1960, Schweinfurt) studied at the Städelschule and lives and works Frankfurt/Main.