Picture "Portuguese 5 / X" (1994) (Unique piece)
Picture "Portuguese 5 / X" (1994) (Unique piece)
Quick info
unique piece | signed | dated | inscribed | oil on wrapping paper | framed | size 64 x 54 cm
Detailed description
Picture "Portuguese 5 / X" (1994) (Unique piece)
Besides the expressive works, there is another side to Ralph Fleck's oeuvre: a gentle, almost filigree stroke. This is revealed in the series "Figures". With a little humour, he shows different types of tourists in individual portraits. He plays with posture and gestures, but also with clichés concerning clothing and fashionable details.
Oil on wrapping paper, 1994. Signed, dated and inscribed. Motif size/sheet size 40 x 30 cm. Size in frame 64 x 54 cm as shown.
About Ralph Fleck
Ralph Fleck's motifs include monumental cityscapes that illustrate the monotonous structures of architecture from different views, as well as expressive and abstract landscapes. The artist, born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1951, applies oil paints to large-format canvases in an impasto painting style. The focus of his work is not the subject matter but the way he deals with structures, forms, and colours.
Fleck studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe and has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg since 2003.
A one-of-a-kind or unique piece is a work of art that has been personally created by the artist. It exists only once due to the type of production (oil painting, watercolours, drawing, etc.).
In addition to the classic unique pieces, there exist the so-called "serial unique pieces". They present a series of works with the same colour, motif and technique, manually prepared by the same artist. The serial unique pieces are rooted in "serial art", a type of modern art, that aims to create an aesthetic effect through series, repetitions and variations of the same objects or themes or a system of constant and variable elements or principles.
In the history of arts, the starting point of this trend was the work "Les Meules" (1890/1891) by Claude Monet, in which for the first time a series was created that went beyond a mere group of works. The other artists, who addressed to the serial art, include Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian and above all Gerhard Richter.