Exhibition Markus Retzlaff - "The Early Work"

Markus Retzlaff is primarily known in Radebeul and far beyond as a graphic artist, because for many years graphics has been the medium in which he can best express himself and in which he feels at home in the truest sense of the word. He has a perfect command of all types of relief and intaglio printing. Etching and related techniques are his favourite way of working. Aquatint is his main focus, as it allows for rich and differentiated work.

At the artist's request, however, the current exhibition is limited to the paintings from his early years. To this day, these works are only known to a small circle and are largely held in private collections. However, the power and originality of his work was recognised early on by friends and connoisseurs. After completing an apprenticeship as a porcelain painter, he worked as a freelance artist from 1983 until he began his studies and became a candidate for the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR in 1988. At the age of 26, he was one of the youngest artists to take part in the last district art exhibition in Dresden in 1989. This exhibition coincided with the autumn of the Peaceful Revolution. The final days of the GDR are reflected in the sometimes gloomy colours of the paintings. Markus Retzlaff was and is a "realistic" artist and does not want to be an innovator or subversive. As a down-to-earth person who is familiar with his surroundings, this way of working is closest to him. By reworking and alienating, every representational motif becomes an artificial world - although this term is already blurred, because everything that surrounds us is already artificial, formed by man, sometimes even deformed. Markus Retzlaff's painting is visio (truth-viewing) in the best sense of the word. This type of art is, on the one hand, spiritualised sensuality and spiritualised nature, and on the other, dreamed reality. It experiences things with intense sensuality and yet questions them again.