Introduction

by Elisabeth Cederstrøm, for the exhibition "Både og" , Storstrøms Kunstmuseum

Heike Arndt is an experimental artist for whom nothing must remain untried. She takes exception to all trammels. Restriction is a naughty word. Janteloven* does not count in her universe.

Perhaps this is because Heike is not Danish, but was born and grew up in the former East Germany. She has always painted and drawn and came as an exceptional six year old into the special art school of the Art Academy for Children in East Berlin. As an adolescent in the 70's, she was educated in ceramics and worked professionally in this medium in various workshops in East Germany.

Heike has always known that she would work and live in the western world. But it was love that caused her to escape the East in 1985 - love for a man and love for freedom. Even though the Berlin Wall has since fallen and the Iron Curtain has drawn back, Heike to this day won't reveal how she managed to get out. She prefers to keep it a secret, explaining "If I told then it would become one less way to get out of a country if necessary."

Arriving in Denmark with only the clothes on her back, her meeting with Scandinavia brought a change in her art. The colours pushed themselves forward. Carefully, she started with tender and delicate tones. Later, she became braver - her power emerged and today the colours are intense.

Although the colours are bright, one will always find something dark and heavy in her paintings. It can be a figure or an abstract shape that keeps the picture centered and steady, rather than dissolving into an ecstatic colour-symphony. Maybe this a relic from her past that will not (or cannot) be released - a weight and seriousness that often characterizes art from the former Eastern Countries. Or perhaps, it is here the ceramist and sculptor peep out in Heike's painting. The joy of working with the solid form, which at the same time gives the picture its body.

Some artists use a whole life to explore and test one technique, one material. That is not the way Heike Arndt works. She wants the freedom to try it all. At her exhibitions, there are works of many techniques and materials: oil paintings, gouaches, lithographs, bronze sculpture, ceramics, glass and various mixed media.

It could be a handicap to spread oneself over so much. But in Heike's case you can see how fertile the correlation between the different techniques can be. A proficiency gained while working with one technique immediately sends a silent echo through the others.

Painting

Surveying Heike's oil paintings is like exploring what most of all resembles a universe of dreams. Just awakened, all you remember is just a long chain of fragments, not a unified or connected whole. Blurred figures come forward. Alone or together with their fellows, they perform their own private actions, which sometimes you recognize and sometimes only just sense.

There is no clear, unambiguous story. Things change before your eyes. Colours metamorphisize themselves into shapes, so that new rooms appear with new strangers and new stories.

Even when the surface of the picture is dominated by one or two heavy figures, the painting has its own internal logic. The figures obviously seem to be aware of each other's presence and often communicate with each other in a wordless dialogue. But the meaning of their conversation is never quite clear to the observer.

Heike Arndt's paintings are not intellectual. No profound opinion hides in them. No complicated symbolic interpretation forces itself forward. Instead, Heike's painting is that of feeling - a feeling of joy as the eye takes advantage of the painting's basic elements of colour and shape.

Influences

It would be obvious to find the roots of Heike Arndt's painting in her native country. In the early 20th century, German expressionism broke through with the artists who took part in "Die Brucke" and "Blaue Reiter" - artists whose painting was strong, sensual, experiential and in vivid colour.

On the other hand, it is not that clear. The very special expressionism of Heike Arndt has gotten its characteristic look exactly because she left her native country and came to Denmark. It is more natural to see it as a present day continuation of the COBRA group's art.

COBRA was an international alliance (COpenhagen, BRuxelles, Amsterdam) which formed in the of the 1940's. Even though the alliance was short-lived, the individual artists kept on working in the same style that characterized the group - a style that placed the spontaneous and expressive in a seat of honour.

In 1990, Heike Arndt traveled to France to study with Gina Pellon, whose paintings are very close to the COBRA painters. Large, intense, expressive figures often dominate her canvas. Figures will probably never be allowed to play as prominent a role in Heike's paintings as in Pellon's, but the way of painting itself the two have in common.

Unconsciously (or maybe consciously?), the artist followed the footsteps of the COBRA artists. In 1992, she received an invitation to Albisola, a small Italian village north of Genova, where Asger Jorn once had a house. The invitation came from Ansgar Elde, known for his glass and ceramic work, who himself had worked with Asger Jorn in 1959.

In Albisola, Heike began serious work with graphics at the Stamperia del Bostrico. In a number of akvatinter you find some of the themes from her Danish paintings.

In the akvatinten, the artist must limit herself to a few colors, so she had to develop a new technique.

The artist cuts her motif in a wooden board. After, the board is worked in different ways, so that it gets a characteristic structure. The artist places the paint directly on the board and the printing can then take place. This way a monotype appears because the colour only lasts one print. The board can be used again. The figures and shapes are kept and can be worked on again, so that new spaces and atmosphere are made. The monotypes have given Heike Arndt the freedom to experiment with colours and shapes in a new way.

After these shape experiments in Italy, the artist felt like working freely with colours again. Characterized by spontaneity, these gouaches and watercolours, not surprisingly, have many glowing colours on big sheets of handmade paper.

Bronze Sculpture

All different and so tight in shape are Heike's small bronze sculptures. Again you recognize the shapes from the paintings which have almost grown out of the canvas and have an independent character. Or is it the other way around? Did they exist in space and then sneak onto the canvas later? Small, stocky and stout they are. With their bodies they express the basic feelings. They are eager to get in contact with their surroundings. Eager to communicate. They shout. They listen.

Again you begin to think about German art and artists like Kähte Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach, who each in their own way created strong expressive sculptures that scream for attention. But often on a very somber and serious background, something that is not present in Heike Arndt's work.

Glass and Ceramic

Bronze is heavy in its being. The opposite can be said about glass which Heike became acquainted with for the first time in Laboratorio Casarini in Savona (not far from Albisola) where some of the COBRA artists had also worked in glass. The figures do not come into play in the glass. Instead it is a game of abstraction with shapes and colours dominating.

When I visited Heike Arndt a few years ago, she told me that she could feel that she was finished with ceramics - that she could not find new challenges in the clay. In Albisola, she got the inclination back though. This is not strange, because exactly in this Italian town, there is a tradition of working in ceramics. It is not just Asger Jorn who worked here, but many artistic friends, including Apple, Corneille, Matta, and others.

In Fabrica Guiseppe Mazzotti, Heike created many new pieces which can be viewed as a continuation of her previous ceramic work; only now the shapes are more tight and the colours new. Beautiful earth colours dominate - colours that have still not found their way into Heike's painting and other work, but that might just be a question of time.

The Future

When a new technique is to be tried and explored, the artist packs her suitcase and travels exactly to the place where there is a workshed or a master who can teach her. In the past year, she has worked not only in Italy and Denmark, but in Greenland and the United States as well. In the months ahead, Heike Arndt will work in Spain and Portugal, as well as returning to Italy, Greenland, and the U.S.

If one day it will be possible to create exciting sculpture on planet Mars, it wound not surprise me if Heike is among the first to try this also. 

How long will this cosmopolitan life go on? A new house is waiting for her in Kettinge on Lolland island in Denmark. Will she ever settle there? Perhaps..

Heike in Search of Perfection
by Inge Meezen, Groll Gallery, Naarden, Holland

"Hi, this is Heike from Denmark." If Heike says that, then she's probably not calling from Denmark, but buzzing around somewhere or other in the world. No trip is too long, no country too desolate, no exertion too great. Heike seeks challenge, adventure, something new, but also light, for in a different light her world will invariably look quite different. It's not only her thoughts which the clouds drifting across Denmark's broad horizons set soaring. In Italy's warm light she also senses bodily and human warmth, in Greenland's stark cold light she sees the shadows with extra emphasis, including the shadows of Western civilization also lying across the country. Shadows, indeed, are always a tough proposition for Heike, the shadows of the past catch up with her everywhere.

Heike is constantly searching for new possibilities for expression, she tries out new techniques, experiments with other materials. She may wish to emulate other people, but even in her youth she wanted to liberate herself from them. Heike's career as an artist commenced with really beautiful, truly individual pottery, but she very soon felt that she couldn't develop any further in this area, and began to paint. Her striking paintings in oils became larger, more abstract, using stronger colors. 

Yet this technique too did not lend itself to fulfilling her in the long run. Even in oils, she could not give expression to everything which moved her. Heike became a sculptress and was very soon producing life-size sculptures in bronze. Within a short time she had also mastered this technique, and the search was on for something new. In Italy she worked in glass and with printing techniques; there's almost nothing which she cannot do. She also reverts again and again to earlier techniques, practicing various disciplines in parallel.

The spontaneity of her working method has meanwhile given way to carefully pondered schemes, yet Heike is still not satisfied, she's not yet at peace with herself. Her self-criticism will persist for a while yet, until she has produced what she herself feels is a perfect work of art and can pursue this path still further. With her talent and her ambition, she will undoubtedly succeed one day.