Axel Schenk, Cologne, November 2014

“The image arises from the doing”.

(Axel Schenk)

“The doing with which he begins, that is also transferred to you to some extent. And I think then painting is always successful when it captivates. When you can’t check it off right away, when you can’t say right away: that’s that. But rather, when you perhaps go home and say: that moved me, that occupied me, that is felt, and that was not just invented.” (Dr. Beate Reifenscheid-Ronnisch, in the opening speech for the exhibition, Galerie Contemporanea, Oberbillig, October 21, 2007).

“Axel Schenk’s paintings push beyond this pictorial space, they reach over into that other mental and spiritual space of our imagination, in order to combine there with what is stored to form new images. In this way, they become meaningful border crossers between the inner world of the painter and that of the viewer. It is this flow, the expression of an expansive spiritual and mental dynamic, which immediately captured my attention for Axel Schenk’s paintings and especially for the “Abstracts” and “Landscapes” shown here.” Eva-Maria Reuther (Opening Siegen, 2011)