Roland Ladwig

(1935-2014)

The German painter was born in Wedel near Hamburg in 1935. From 1957 to 1961 he studied at the universities and academies in Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart and at the summer academy with Prof. Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg. The artist lived and worked in Berlin and Provence and died in Berlin in 2014. His works have been shown in 150 solo exhibitions in Europe and overseas such as in Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne, Vienna, Paris, Washington and in the most renowned galleries in France and Germany, such as the Pels-Leusden gallery in Berlin and the Bernheim gallery -Jeune shown in Paris. In addition, many of his works can be found in numerous public and important private collections in Europe and overseas, such as the Leopold Collection in Vienna.

The flyleaf of the catalog published on the occasion of his exhibition in the Pels-Leusden Gallery in Berlin in 1982 contains the following dedication: „For the very talented Roland Ladwig, who cannot find his equals in Germany today. Occasionally the visit 15 V. 70 at O. Kokoschka.“ This sentence not only expresses Kokoschka’s artistic appreciation for Ladwig, but can also be seen as an intellectual and stylistic determination of the position of an extraordinary artist. While in some early works, in figurative works, as well as in his Norwegian landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s, formal and content-related references to Edvard Munch can still be heard, the works of the last decades find their starting point in the tension between the late work of Lovis Corinth and the work of Kokoschka. Without ever losing sight of the diverse manifestations of contemporary art, he never saw the need to adapt to given daily trends and isms and to pay tribute to an often questionable zeitgeist. The spiritual home of his artistic concern is the expressionism of classical modernism. The eruptive power and immediacy of his painterly presentation would hardly have been suitable for adaptation to contemporary fashions. The dynamic flow of his painterly writing is too haunting, too spontaneous, too passionate to allow himself to be disciplined by a rationally controlled formal superstructure; on the other hand, his eye is too sharp-sighted, the topographical writing and formal definiteness of his artistic communication too surgically precise To satisfy himself with his painterly concern in the arbitrariness of a more abstract pictorial language.

Source: https://www.rolandladwig.de/vita-1/

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