Artist Ansgar Skiba in action

Ansgar Skiba

Rampant colours, swirling brushstrokes – Ansgar Skiba's forces of nature

Ansgar Skiba's paintings are of impressive intensity: A dynamic rush of colours, whitecaps dancing on breaking waves, lush vegetation that the artist has brought onto the canvas with his hands, wooden sticks or brush handles and which now seems to overgrow it in relief.

It is the interplay of surface and space that particularly interests Skiba. He often uses a perspective that resembles the view through a zoom lens: Landscapes and nature are reduced to a small, archetypal section and convey an intense impression of the beauty of the whole precisely through the reduction to detail on a small surface.

Ansgar Skiba, born in 1959, was admitted to evening studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in his hometown of Dresden, Germany, at the age of 14. When he was 16 years old, he passed the qualifying examination for studies at the Kunstakademie. However, the East German authorities made him wait until 1981 to begin his studies because he was "politically unreliable". After a year at the Dresden Academy, he left for West Germany. There Skiba continued his studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy between 1983 and 1988. Since then, he has travelled to numerous countries and landscapes in search of motifs and inspiration. For him, despite his training at two outstanding academies in East and West Germany, one thing is certain: "My teacher was always nature."

Ansgar Skiba's magnificent, varied landscapes can be found in numerous collections, including the Kunstmuseum in Gelsenkirchen.

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