Gisela Schlicht - Painting between Passion and Precision
Peter Funken
The work of the painter Gisela Schlicht is complex and multi-faceted. It encompasses numerous groups of works and many intellectual or methodical starting points, in this way demonstrating an unmistakable individual vitality and expressive power - far beyond fashion and trends. The characteristics of Schlicht's art are its hard-hitting, spontaneous and empathic qualities, an authentic signature and a sound awareness of colours and forms.
Since her artistic beginnings during the early eighties, the artist has repeatedly tried out new approaches, constantly extending and developing her repertoire. Gisela Schlicht began with the production of abstract-informel images, although she was not only aiming for pure expression and nuances of colour. At the beginning of the nineties, she made the expressive-informel intensity of her works more concrete by turning to themes that focused on her ideas concerning humanity and nature. A painting of forms and symbols emerged, whereby the process of image production and a portrayal of the structural, morphological, dynamic or static aspects involved in a process shifted to the focal point of her activity rather than an exact description of nature or mankind - that is, the defining features of the world.
Two aspects connected in her work also determine it: on the one hand, there is the emotional, sensual and wilfully acting side, and as a contrast, a strong interest in philosophical questions. There are works on canvas which emerge from long working processes, with an exactly predetermined painterly composition, carried out with maximum precision. Repeatedly, we find balls, circles, crosses and crossings in such works. These are the elements, focal points and phenomena of painting which sees itself - in the best sense of the word - as philosophising, that is, as posing questions, searching for meaning. One, or sometimes more balls float like planets in the infinity of (pictorial) space. In such works Gisela Schlicht combines the concrete quality of her painting with convincing illusion. Ball and cross are to be understood as ideal symbols, they stand for life and death, the finite and the infinite, spirit and matter, the Dionysiac and the Apollonian principles.
The dualism of her work form provides a key to understanding a large part of her oeuvre, for in numerous work complexes the artist concerns herself with quite different questions: in the series "Mutants and Cheerful Souls", she presents scurrilous beings before a yellow background, characters rapidly put to paper that appear to fluctuate between anamorphosis and a robot-like existence. But there are also "Micro-organisms" which are pictured in spontaneous gestures - all beings which arise from areas of colour, lines and droplets, whose life originates only from the artist's spontaneity and pleasure in experimenting.
A typical feature of her painting is the use of text and writing in the picture. Schlicht enjoys quoting poets and philosophers, writing sentences beneath and into the pictures, preferably aphorisms by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, but also quotations from Kant, Kafka and Erich Fried. The short texts give the painting an additional dimension, provide a direction for an understanding of the images without entirely fixing an interpretation.
Gisela Schlicht's painting is open and mobile, but by means of colour and form it is capable of investigating current themes and problems in a concrete and pointed way; for example when she reproduces the collapsed New York Twin Towers simply by drawing the lines of the ground plan in the middle of a blood-red explosion field, or when she conveys threat, shock and existential need in her large-format cross collage "Daily News".
The artist works exclusively with acrylic paints, either using these in the spirit of panel painting as a paste covering the primer, or watered down, in a similar way to watercolour painting. Gisela Schlicht lays her canvas or papers on the floor to work, for in this way she is better able to develop creativity from her own movements. Gisela Schlicht has found a medium in painting and its many possibilities which permits her to work in a universal way - that is, using both mind and body.
©  Peter Funken  Berlin  2002
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