“You have to be able to physically feel euphoria and depression, tenderness and violence, fear and passion, longing and despair, and above all the peculiarity through your eyes as well as with your fingertips. Only on such a basis can artistic quality emerge. And that is the quality that connects artists such as Lukas Cranach, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breugel, Rembrandt, Goya, Gustave Courbet, Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, Otto Dix, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Horst Janssen. What all these artists have in common is the (pictorial) realization that the experience of the body is the starting point of everything. The body as the place of greatest desire, strength, weakness, vulnerability and awkwardness. The Body of Fear. The body of aging. The sexual body. The mortal body. The body as the instance of the greatest certainty and the greatest insecurity.”

Texts by Jürgen Kisters