Gille, Sighard: Landscape of Berlin (1976–79)

Painter Sighard Gille was born in 1941, and belongs to the second generation of the so-called Leipzig School. He was a student of Bernhard Heisig and Wolfgang Mattheuer, and he has had his own class of painting at the Leipzig College of Graphics and Book Design (HGBL) since 1992. He makes paintings, graphics, sculptures and photos. His starting point is the world as it appears to the eye, with all its beauty and contradictions. Even at the time of graduation, in the early seventies, his painting was marked by expressivity and an intensive palette. With the nineties, his picture series became more and more powerful, ecstatic. His compositions are the expressions of the feast of the senses, of states of rapture, but also of an increasing anxiety, of angst. His subjects include groups, curious figures, nudes, images of the Madonna, urban landscapes, portraits of pop culture’s icons. The intensively coloured, strongly emotional pictures represent a world rich in sensual impressions and full of tension.