The artist Erwin Plönes.

You have surely noticed that both the art prints and the silk scarves feature designs and patterns by Erwin Plönes.

Like the Bauhaus, the 'Kölner Werkschulen' also believed that painting was an important prerequisite for product design. Therefore, the application of the artist's graphic works to "everyday objects" is not a break with his work, but rather a continuation of his creative output, as these now fully blossom.

 

Who was Erwin Plönes, born in Wesel in 1925, died in Brussels in 2015?

To shed light on this, one must examine the artist's training institution. This artistic training ground, in contrast to the academies, can best be understood by comparing it to the Bauhaus, with which it existed concurrently for several years.

Erwin studied there during the Second World War, from the summer semester of 1941 to the winter semester of 1941/42, and again after the war from the summer semester of 1947 to the winter semester of 1951/52. One of his main teachers was Professor Otto Gerster. During his years of study at the Cologne School, the Bauhaus no longer existed: it was, as is well known, dissolved in 1933, but its influence continues to this day, both in Germany and beyond. The Cologne School existed until 1971.

At the heart of both training institutions were the studios and thus practical training. This is evident in the artist's work: he mastered a wide range of techniques such as stained glass, sgraffito, linocut, frottage, drawing, and landscape painting, but, following his intuition, he created his own variations of the techniques he had learned, especially the "wood mosaic," or as I call it, "painting in wood," a term borrowed from stained glass, where individual pieces are also assembled into a complete composition. Furthermore, with his "painting in wood" technique, he illustrates a strategic goal of the Bauhaus and the workshops that followed: the synthesis of the arts. For on the one hand, he engages in craftsmanship by producing the wooden components, and on the other hand, he creates a painterly work.

It was also interesting to learn that his twin brother also attended the 'Kölner Werkschulen' and worked as an artist.  Initially, the brothers worked together, primarily on public art projects, "in complete harmony," as one curator once described it. Even today, various sgraffito works and stained-glass windows by the two artists, created in close collaboration, can be admired in the Leverkusen area. The twins' father, a high school teacher and not formally trained as a painter, liked to paint. 

When Erwin moved to Brussels with his wife, he developed an independent style of works, including numerous drawings, landscapes, and the series of wooden mosaics mentioned above.

His works

- Motives

A large part of the works are landscapes. 
Landscapes reflect different aims and statements of an artist, for example, the landscape as background in Leonardo da Vinci's work or as a constructed world landscape showed by Joachim Patinir, the landscape as an idyll, as descriptive nature, as a projection surface for feelings and fears in Caspar David Friedrich; the landscape as a mood piece or as an expression of the study of weather conditions and the turning point of time, as in Turner's work, where suddenly locomotives "steam" through the pictures.

Erwin Plönes leaned more towards a theme that is even a genre in Japan, namely the seasons : he shows the magic of the seasons, the power of change in nature, perhaps also meditative images that help one to find peace.

In addition, the pictures from his estate show various other motifs, such as the theme of the cosmos, certainly not new in his time, but very special when one thinks of his black and white works.

A large part of the artist's work consists of abstractions. Considering the diverse forms of abstraction, Erwin Plönes' works range from dynamic to organic . Here, too, he follows his own path.

- Techniques

As already mentioned, the artist worked in various techniques, juggling, for example, sgraffito, stained glass, linocut, eggshell, frottage, and other methods even during his time in Leverkusen. After moving to Brussels, and throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, he created works in gouache, pen and ink, or charcoal on paper, such as the aforementioned landscapes or drawings in figurative or abstract styles. One technique he employed from 1990 onward is the self-developed and already mentioned "wood mosaic" technique, which I also refer to as "painting in wood." The most outstanding work in a series bears the title "Point and Plane." With both the title and the depiction, Erwin Plönes directly references Wassily Kandinsky's 1926 Bauhaus book No. 9, "Point and Line to Plane." The use of color is certainly no accident either; In his 1911 work "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," Kandinsky explores the effects of color. He associated blue with tranquility and infinity, as infinite as points in the universe.

Finally, the entire series of wooden mosaics and the technique used in them demonstrate how strongly the artist was influenced by the nature of the craft schools.

- Classification

If one takes the figurative and abstract wooden mosaics as a basis for classification, Erwin Plönes' technique lies between Kandinsky and Duchamp: Kandinsky and the artist group 'Der Blaue Reiter' strove for an introduction of ideas and poetry into art ("On the spiritual in art").
Art should not only appeal to the eyes, but penetrate matter and reach the soul. Art and craft should enter into a dialogue. Duchamp, on the other hand, believed that the technique of painting was obsolete. In fact, art was more than technique and beauty: what mattered were ideas. And above all, in his opinion, art could not be defined without limiting it. Nothing was more important than the individuality of artists. Therefore, even the art of Marcel Duchamp could not be pigeonholed.

Plönes' woodwork displays poetry (Kandinsky) and chooses as his technique the wood mosaic, a technique he introduced himself (rather than painting, which he considered obsolete after Duchamp). Looking at his abstractions on paper, the artist also demonstrates his own unique approach, straddling chance and geometry: dynamic, organic representations. In his landscapes, he thematically approaches Japanese depictions of the seasons, but stylistically remains true to Western realism, juggling various techniques.

More information about the artist and especially about the techniques he worked with and how these are embedded in art history can be found in the publication "Art Techniques".

You can also find images of individual works on the blog from time to time.