Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

Constantin Nitsche Wrestles with the Limits of Painting

The German painter, now rooted in Marseille, speaks candidly about his distaste for intellectualizing ideas, the objects he returns to like favorite words and the rough process behind his increasingly colorful canvases.

The artist Constantin Nitsche, who studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, works in a converted garage studio in Marseille’s 6th arrondissement. His latest exhibition, “Les mains” (“The Hands”), at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, arrives three years after his debut show, “Oranges et Lavande.” Running through October 3, it takes its title from a letter Franz Kafka wrote to the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská, in which he says, “I can’t hold enough of you in my hands” (“Ich kann doch nicht genug von Dir in Händen halten”). Nitsche grafts this idea of incompleteness, of never being able to fully contain something, onto the way a painting can never fully translate what he sees. Creativity, quite simply, can never be completely expressed. Still, he finds this Sisyphean frustration endlessly compelling.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

The exhibition encompasses still lifes and portraits in placid compositions: bright flowers, a yellow screen, the Mediterranean horizon line, a silhouette of the painter’s wife beside a crystal ball, domestic interiors and a strange self-portrait as Pinocchio. Each work is built through a painstaking process of layering, with revisions and subtractions made and remade over many months, and earlier versions of the paintings often whisper through the surface.

We spoke to the artist from Lugano, where he was vacationing with his family before the opening. He discussed his fixation with cats, how living near the Mediterranean awakened his use of color and why he doesn’t see his shows as concept albums.

I’m curious about life in Marseille as an artist. Why were you drawn to the city, and how does working there filter into your work?

We moved because, to be blunt, we were broke. We were living in Düsseldorf, and my wife and I thought we had to get out of that town because it was so gray. I had sold one painting, and I said, let’s take the money and pay for the move, and then we just took the chance. In Düsseldorf, I had a weirdly strict palette. I was policing myself not to use too much color; I don’t know why. I think it was the German esprit weighing on my shoulders. So moving changed my use of color a lot. I work much more........

© Observer