CAROLA DEWOR | THE SPACE WITHIN

CAROLA DEWOR | THE SPACE WITHIN

“I believe that people who want to experience art do not want to be taught but touched. And I wish that my paintings could do just that! ” – Carola Dewor

Carola Dewor is a painter. For 40 years, the brushstroke’s color, form, and gesture have been her passion and language. Expressionist painting, which was revived and fresh during her art studies at the University of the Arts in West Berlin in the early 80s, has influenced her.
Her artistic interest is in inhabited and uninhabited environments as symbols of human life; it is in places that unite in themselves past, present, and future. The human being is absent in her paintings, enabling the viewer to enter these spaces himself. Examples of art that inspire her can be found in Vilem Hamershøi, Adolf Menzel, Bonnard, Vuillard, and others, where these aspects can also be experienced.

Carola Dewor: “I believe that people who want to experience art do not want to be taught but touched. And I wish that my paintings could do just that! “

How much this idea corresponds with the conception of space as an inner, emotional space is made palpable by the works of Carola Dewor: they invite the viewer to an encounter with himself, to a moment of pause, which in its energy flows over to the viewer. Carola Dewor has created art that gives strength.

• Dr. Phil. Christiane Dätsch
  University of Education Ludwigsburg, Institute for Cultural Management

” My paintings are open stories that manifest themselves in inhabited spaces and always relate to my history and time. My interiors are about people who are not directly visible but are represented by the space and the things in them.” – Carola Dewor

THE SPACE WITHIN

In my painting, I want to make time, past and present, their atmospheric and psychological connections visible.
For some years now, I have returned to the depiction of interiors in all their manifestations, which has always occupied me artistically in earlier years as well: the interior. It offers me an infinite, sensual-visual vocabulary with which I can express everything.
They are open stories that manifest themselves in inhabited spaces and always relate to my history and time. My interiors are about people who are not directly visible but are represented by the space and the things in them.
I have always been fascinated by things and the space surrounding me, giving me security and privacy.
I remember one of the first paintings I consciously made as a child; it showed the table in our living room from a perspective view. For me, the inhabitants’ essence is reflected in their rooms’ design and in the relationship they develop over time with the furniture and utensils.

“Every brushstroke and every stain leaves a physical- concrete trace, which in its autonomy can also be considered detached from the content of the picture and yet, at the same time, brings it forth.”

Rooms tell the stories of the people who live or have lived in them; it is their traces and signs in which they remain present.
The first series of interiors was created while I was still a student at the University of the Arts in Berlin in the 1980s. That was the beginning of the era of the “Neue Wilden” (New Wild Ones), who took their cue from the painting of the German Expressionists and whose rough style was well suited to the big-city life of the time. It also suited my conception of painting, which has been preserved in its approach in my paintings to this day.
A characteristic of my pictorial expression is the representation of light, which gives atmosphere to the room. Light creates spatial depth, in addition to the use of illusionistic perspective, which still exerts a fascination on me by deceiving the eye and creating a space of depth on the two-dimensional surface, from which arises the perennial question: What is real?

The interior has a tradition in the history of art. The Fauves, Matisse, Bonnard, and Vuillard, as well as painters as diverse as David Hockney and the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, have created works of this genre. The theme of the interior touches no matter what culture a person belongs to, because a room, in all its manifestations, is involuntarily connected with existential, psychological, cultural, and historical themes.
As a source of inspiration,
I use my photographs and photographs I discovered during research on the World Wide Web. Working with photographs liberates me; I feel less determined by details.
The photographs become independent interpretations through reduction and change in the painting process.
My selection is purely subjective; the motifs do not represent a particular place but have a universal effect.

“There is no inside without an outside; therefore, streets and houses have fascinated me as long as their interiors. But it is necessary for me to concentrate on one theme at a time, which can mean several years, before I come back and change the subject.”

Mostly it is intense light and color moods or the impact of an extraordinary view of a room that sets my empathy and imagination in motion and forms the basis for new works.
Beyond the subject, the medium of painting has an essential meaning for me because every brushstroke and every stain leaves a physical- concrete trace, which in its autonomy can also be considered detached from the content of the picture and yet, at the same time, brings it forth. In addition, finely tuned color nuances, contrasts,
and weightings are essential to my painting.
To bring out both the motif and the painting itself on the picture support is a tightrope walk and a challenge that repeatedly arises at the base of my creative painting process. In painting lies my aesthetic approach to the world, which touches me and connects me with it, and I wish that the viewers are equally touched by my paintings.

• Carola Dewor, September 2022

See the full article in Art Market Magazine Issue #79