Walter Libuda

Walter Libuda's work is not easy to summarise. On the one hand, because it is almost unparalleled in its diversity. One searches in vain for media boundaries (apart from "technical" forms of representation such as photography or video). Stage, picture box, object, assemblage or sculpture, everything is possible, but above all this artist is a gifted painter and draughtsman. What Libuda depicts, however, remains enigmatic, is neither abstract nor figurative, neither constructive nor realistic. At best, he borrows vague patterns from the surfaces of everyday life in order to incorporate them into his very special pictorial worlds. Visual worlds that do not seem too far removed from madness. Visual worlds that harbour a secret that cannot be universally recognised, deciphered or communicated. In a reality that is designed to recognise and decode everything and to have to communicate it without being asked, Libuda's unreal reality seems like the exact opposite. Even picture titles don't help here; the confusion continues in them. Where they purport to offer support and direction, they often enough turn out to be a chimera - or, at best, a lead to a vague and magical understanding.

Biographical information
Walter Libuda, born in 1950, studied at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (HGB) from 1973 to 1979, the last two years as a master student of Bernhard Heisig. He then worked as an assistant at the HGB and moved to Berlin in 1985. He has been a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund since 1992 and a member of the Saxon Academy of Arts since 1998. His works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. He has been awarded the Fred Thieler Prize for Painting by the Berlinische Galerie and the Gerhard Altenbourg Prize by the Lindenau Museum Altenburg. Libuda lives in Schildow near Berlin.