Two Artists – One Project
Juggling many forms of artistic representation: Oskar Rink
“It was a long night,” says Oskar Rink, which explains why the coffee machine is her first port of call. She’s just met two deadlines, and then there’s the two paintings for a collector in Paris that are next in line. The refrigerator hums quietly behind her. Yellow Post-its are neatly lined up on its black door. As of today, there are two fewer. “I love crossing things off my list,” says the Leipzig artist. “And I hate forgetting things.”
The corner where the refrigerator, hot plate and a table are standing is the nerve centre of her large studio spanning 120 square metres and boasting five-metre-high ceilings at the Alte Spinnerei, the artistic heart of the city. Leaning against a pillar is a painting she’s working on. Next to the entrance, finished paintings stand facing the wall. “I still need time to look at them with a fresh mind.” A new canvas is set up in the corner opposite, a table with oil paints on the left, one with acrylic tubes on the right. A couple of undercoats are drying close by. “Takes about 400 years,” she says. On the shelves are tools, paper, foil, frames, tape, books and magazines. A sofa is set upon two euro pallets beneath a raised floor. “My studio’s my favourite place; it’s where I spend most of my life.”
The 40-year-old juggles artistic forms of representation. She paints, preferably in very large formats, but has recently also done much smaller works. She designs room-sized objects and sculptures. She paints things that are built and also builds what she paints. In addition, there are spontaneous projects such as the suit made of bubble wrap that she tailored during the lockdown, or the jumpsuit made of glittering gold safety foil. It’s pretty fiddly work, she says, but she studied at a fashion school in Munich before getting a master’s degree in art history at Sotheby’s in London.
Many of the motifs featured in her work adorn her studio. The ladder she paints with, the rubber tree whose succulent leaves she likes so much. And there’s the many chairs that are spread across the floor here. Geometry, shapes, haptics, colours – Rink loves everything that defines a space.
When she gets stuck, she perches on her old green wooden chair, which is speckled with lots of little spots of paint. It belonged to her father, who died in 2017. Arno Rink was a pioneer of the New Leipzig School, a teacher of Neo Rauch and many others who went on to become very famous. “He helped himself to that one when he was young.” While at art school, she reckons. She more or less grew up in his studio. The pungent smell of turpentine, the rough wooden floor, the open window to the garden, the coarse boar hide on the sofa – many of her early childhood memories revolve around her father’s workroom. “I used to build camps there while he was absorbed in his work. Later on, I made sketches of his big oil paintings at home.” Today, she wears her father’s old dungarees when she paints. “They bring me luck”, she says, “and they weren’t so grubby when I first started wearing them. He didn’t mess around like me.”
What about the other Post-its stuck to the fridge? There’s a jacket she’s currently braiding out of spaghetti, a project that requires a good sense of timing and a lot of perseverance. “You mustn’t let it get too soft while cooking. And not too hard when they’re braided.” And then there’s the old Porsche she inherited. She’s currently recreating it out of paper on a one-to-one scale. The studio as a garage – she’s got enough space after all.
The guy who paints with a spirit level: Robert Seidel
Robert Seidel begins his working day at the studio by cracking an egg. He mixes it with one part water and one part dammar, a resin dissolved in turpentine, until a viscous emulsion emerges, to which he finally adds pigments of the paints he needs for the day. He paints his often large-format pictures like the old masters, with egg tempera.
Monumental emptiness reigns in his studio at the Alte Spinnerei in Leipzig – white walls, high ceilings, hazy light shining from neon tubes. A little kitchen radio stands somewhat forlornly on the grey floor in the middle of the room while an induction stove top lies upside down on a beer crate. A net of oranges dangles from the dial on the heater. Even the large canvas on which he’s painting a cityscape of San Francisco looks small on the wall opposite the tall windows. When visitors come, he sometimes hangs a painting or two. It’s not supposed to get too cosy here.
“I hail from a working-class family, and that’s how I see my work. Go to the studio, sit down, make something, then something happens.” Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. Wednesday is a day off, says Seidel, the son of a pharmacy clerk and a heating mechanic. He knew early on that he never wanted to be anything but a painter.
At first, the 37-year-old found his motifs in his local area and his focus was on geographical subjects in the early days. The suburban architecture of the Mulde Valley, where he grew up in Grimma, was an important subject for him at the time. Rather like a chronicler, he studied different building forms and documented typologies. The pop-cultural scene soon joined the fray. He painted record covers of soul and reggae bands he liked to listen to and dissected the cool poses of the musicians into their individual parts. He expanded the labyrinths of the classic computer game Pac Man into the bounds of the infinite and depicted the teenage charm of motorcycles.
A sentiment expressed by Neo Rauch, in whose master class he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, has staye d with him ever since. “Neo always said ‘Sooner or later you can’t get past the figure.’” But how do you find your own way? How do you break free from your famous teacher? How do you approach people? “In portraiture, you have to get much closer to a person. That takes a different kind of empathy than copying an album cover.”
Seidel spent a month cycling along the Danube, from the Black Forest to its mouth at the Black Sea. Along the way, he took photos, painted with watercolours and wrote a diary. And he met a wide variety of people in the eight countries he passed through. He painted them for a series of portraits that was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
When Robert Seidel works, he usually sits for long hours. Knuckling down is important to him. “Ten, 12 hours. Then a beer in the evening. That’s how the day goes. What canned food did I eat today – beans or lentils? I don’t have much else to say.” He doesn’t switch between paintings. First he sketches, then he paints. When one picture is finished, he starts the next. Sometimes he slips a picture of trainers in between – another one of those series. From retro classics to ugly trainers with padded soles, he paints the shoes on sanded-down painting boards.
“I never wanted to be a painter with a hobbyhorse,” he says. Neither in terms of content, nor in terms of
ideas. So he’s still looking for subjects. Over the past year, forests have become a recurring theme. After all, he lives with his family on the edge of the forest. And so he starts each morning with the great, time-honoured tradition of past masters that is cracking an egg and enriching it with pigments to make the shades he needs.
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This article has first been published in the printed edition of 30 Grad in spring 2021. You can subscribe here for free.