14 April - 27 September 2006
Werner Schriefers – 80th birthday
Cabinet Exhibition
Using delicate botanic motifs painted behind glass, where a multitude of forms and colours unfold, the painter Werner Schriefers (1926-2003) began conquering a territory of his own after 1945. Throughout his entire work, he considered painting as an organic process: “I constantly follow the development of a picture. It is something biological, it grows”. As a pioneer of informal painting, Schriefers developed the object in the course of action in order to “grasp its beauty like that of a flower whose species and origin cannot be identified”. As a collector he pursued the same goal: his “collection of works and forms”, as we call it, donated to Kolumba shortly before his death in 2003, comprises - like a cornucopia of innumerable possibilities - several thousand objects from all areas of applied art, mostly glass, ceramics, furniture and technical equipment. This exemplary collection attributes great value to innovation as well as to respect for the material and utility. Thus, it contemporizes one of the basic ideas of the former Diözesanmuseum and, in its search for the necessary beauty of things, it makes us aware of the ethic responsibility in creation. A comprehensive catalogue concerning the collection of the works and forms will be published in autumn 2006.
(Book publication)
