Harmut Piniek: anthropogen

anthropogenic: Exhibition with pictures by the painter Hartmut Piniek

Hartmut Piniek, born in 1950 in Wolgast, studied painting under Arno Rink at the HGB Leipzig, where he later taught painting himself. Two geographical regions are decisive for his artistic thinking: firstly the coastal landscape of the Baltic Sea, where he spent his childhood, and then above all the extensive brown coal mines in the Leipzig area, a landscape space that is as suggestive as it is gloomy, the result of man's massive intervention in the order of nature.

With "anthropogenic", Hartmut Piniek reflects human influence not only as an intervention in the landscape and material environment, but also as an existential observation of existence itself. His multi-layered pictorial spaces combine precisely placed architectural fragments with minimized figures in seemingly endless landscape spaces.
In these poetic constellations, nature appears as a culturally and mentally reshaped space of experience. Piniek's painting evokes the impression of an afterworld to be reverently pacified and at the same time opens up a contemplative space of thought that combines aesthetic and anthropogenic questions.