Johannes Heisig

Johannes Heisig, born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1953, studied there at the Academy of Visual Arts. From 1988 to 1991 he worked as a professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Dresden and latterly its president. Johannes Heisig now lives and works as a freelance artist in Dresden and Berlin. His works are collected by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the British Museum, London and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, among others.

Johannes Heisig is the son of the painter Bernhard Heisig and is considered a representative of the socially critical tradition of realism. He deals with a wide variety of themes and makes them his pictorial motifs, whereas landscape painting plays a significant role in his oeuvre.

In those landscape paintings, he offers the viewer a vista of the vast Southern French landscape. In the foreground, plants and trees are dimly visible, while in the background, hills, horizon and sky are shrouded in a diffuse blue and violet light of the rising sun on a summer's day.

With a loose brush, quick ductus and a steady hand, the artist delivers a glimpse of the landscape that surrounded him while painting. In doing so, he unleashes chains of associations about travelling, going on a walk and exploring. "When I paint, I always fly a little," this sentence by Heisig is an example of the spherically resonant feeling of freedom immanent in the paintings.