BERLIN.- Contemporary Fine Arts opened the fourth solo show by Peter B鰄nisch, entitled PORTRAITS, presented in the gallery’s new space in Berlin Charlottenburg.

In his choice of painting materials, as well as his support, Peter B鰄nisch has always availed himself of a great variety of media. After graduating from the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden K黱ste, where he was taught by Anselm Reyle and Andreas Slominski, the artist, born in 1977 in Waiblingen, initially favoured drawing. In recent years, he has increasingly turned his attention to the canvas, working at first with such classic materials as tempera, wax crayons, watercolours, and acrylics. In recent years, he added the rather unusual painting materials wax and wood, a step into three-dimensionality, but always associated with the figure and representation.

With his series of works painted in sand, the artist takes another step in questioning classic painting materials.

Since the Renaissance, artists have added sand to their paint – we know this of, amongst others, Vermeer, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt. The paints gained volume which therefore didn’t have to be created through illusionist perspectives. In modernism, the cubists in particular used it for its tactile qualities, and later T鄍ies and Dubuffet were not the only artists who were enthusiastic about the versatility and ephemerality of this material.

B鰄nisch is fascinated by the immediacy between the act of drawing and the finished picture in sand, the merging of support and material. The directness of the process of genesis enables him to explore in his portraits his constant leitmotif: the artistic search for the basic motifs of the conditio humana. On layers of dyed sand, he creates seemingly spontaneous, sometimes humorous drawings, where B鰄nisch approximates the interiority of humans.