58 - HARTWIG EBERSBACH

HARTWIG EBERSBACH (born 1940 in Zwickau, based in Leipzig) Small Crucifixion, 1985 Oil on hardboard. 80 x 110 cm. Framed. Monogrammed and dated (19)85 on the lower left. Titled, dated, and signed on the reverse. Hartwig Ebersbach’s works are characterized by an expressive, informal style and thick application of paint. Trained under Bernhard Heisig, he led the course in experimental art at the Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Design, a program he himself had founded. In the early 1980s, he was a member of Group 37.2, which sought to redefine the role of art in society. From an early stage, Ebersbach’s painting has involved the interweaving of his own figurative forms with Christian iconography. A band of shadow runs through the upper third of the painting, like a dark crossbeam of the cross, against which a bright, rearing mass presses from below; in the lower right, the image breaks apart into shades of yellow and ochre that resemble an explosion. The viewer’s gaze falls from above onto the scene, as if from a bird’s-eye view of the Crucified One himself—and here, too, only he seems tangible, yet not as a figure, but as a pure intersection of axes, a point at which all action converges: a colorful bundle of energy that holds the composition together at its very core.