Helmut Middendorf

Helmut Middendorf (born 1953 in Dinklage, Germany) studied at the Berlin Academy of Art from 1973 to 1979. Middendorf experimented with many different possibilities for creating art but in the 1970s turned to a subjective, representational style that identified him with the ‘Jungen Wilden’, who propagated ‘vehement painting’. Middendorf works in series according to themes chosen from his immediate environment and personal experience. Early paintings documented the convulsive movements of dancers at the ‘SO 36’ club in Berlin-Kreuzberg or the pose of a band’s singer. In 1977 Helmut Middendorf and others founded the legendary Galerie am Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg, which showed films and performance as well as paintings and traditional fine artworks. Since the early 1990s Middendorf has been living between Berlin and Athens and the works included here, Dafni (titled after the area in Athens where Middendorf has a studio) and A2 are from a series the artist made in response to the cityscape of Athens. Particularly striking for Middendorf was the predominance of concrete structures - in opposition perhaps to the classical conception of the city - and these works feature the grey tones of the cityscape.

Since 1979 Middendorf has been teaching experimental film at the Berlin Hochschule der Künste, a medium which he was working in alongside painting when he was still a student. In his later works, Middendorf reduced his palette and turned to new subject matters. The ‘black pictures’, which he painted in the late 1980s, were reflections on his own life, his position as an artist and signalled a new departure.