Speech at the opening of the Tammen Gallerie Berlin, 20.3.2009
The red in the painting is the only color of the happenings on stage, it is the color of the dancer’s clothes who is centered in the spring sacrifice. She tears out her sexual organ in a frenzied act and sacrifices herself while the other men as well as women standing in the background watch the death dance magnetized.
Sebastian Heiner is not in search of superficial analogies and does not indulge in escapism when he seeks to reconcile his esthetic experiences trained on western art of expression with the artistic traditions of the Far East.
These are as well as the theatre the Zen oriented arts meaning poetry, calligraphy and painting and also the traditional martial arts especially the sword fighting and archery.
When conversing the painter emerges as a close observer of a society that is difficult for us to grasp. A society in which the people’s lives and workings take place beyond all that is familiar to us. A mighty and brute service enterprise infused with the utmost social and political antagonisms which seems at the verge of unloading its tensions in a struggle just as the colors in the paintings. Throughout this the people foremost those of the lower social class display their ever friendly countenances.
«Breakup» is the newest of his paintings made at the return to Berlin. It shows an amorphous restlessness in the rhythmic movements which contrasts to the early apocalyptic Berlin paintings that longingly wailed dwelling on the art of disaster.
Hansdieter Erbsmehl
Berlin, 20. March 2009