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| Dietrich Orth: Krankenhaus - Nationalsozialismus, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 161,8 x 104,5 cm |
DIETRICH ORTH
Delmes & Zander is delighted to show a one-man exhibition with works by Dietrich Orth (*1956 – 2018). The gallery first showed the artist's work in 1989. David Zwirner dedicated a solo exhibition to the self-taught artist in New York in 1994, Kasper König at the Portikus Frankfurt 1997. And yet Orth's work defies clear categorization and can at best be situated in the equivocal territory which Roberta Smith once termed as Conceptional Outsider Art. His bold-coloured large-format canvasses are at once a register of abstract concepts, spiritual concerns, and excruciatingly authentic personal experience. After years of struggling with clinical psychosis, Orth discontinued painting, leaving behind an emotionally complex microcosm of rare beauty.
Orth started painting in his late twenties. From here on he developed a unique imagery and peculiar syntax that functions as a vehicle of therapy for the actively involved viewer: an interplay between representation, text and the artist's own mental performance. Orth's texts are essentially instructional and function both as titles and quasi-mystical diagrams, the visual correspondence to a physical state that transcends merely personal and curative concerns. They may provide the viewer with instructions on how to “walk exhilarated and lightheartedly” on his heels or prompt him to stand at 80 cm from the canvas so as to experience the “pleasant mood” emanated by the visualization of a certain image, or, as the contemplation of another work assures, to “feel like a newborn person.”
As such, Orth's paintings can be seen as an investigation on body language, the effects of psychopharmaceutical medication and the study of a wide range of emotional landscapes and states of mind broken down to illustrated and structured processes of experience.
Works by the artist have been recently shown in 2018 at the mumok Vienna in Optik Schröder II and at the MONA Tasmania Australia in Museum of Everything.
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