Similarities

SIMILARITIES. By Anke Fröhlich-Schauseil

Article published in 27 July 2024

Culture, article Dresdener Neueste Nochrickten

Two influential artists: John Yeadon and Max Uhlig received the FAMA Lifetime Achievement Award at the Palais Summer in Dresden.

Two award winners: John Yeadon in front of his painting ‘Dignity and Impudence ’from 2023Photo: Hendrik Meyer

Max Uhlig (*1937) and John Yeadon (*1948), two painters and printmakers who can each look back on a great life’s work, were honoured at the Dresden Palais Summer. But they are also united by their differences.

John Yeadon observes human behaviour in all its human folly and depicts it in the spirit of ‘grotesque realism’. He disturbs the audience with jokes and provocations on political and social issues. As a conscious eclectic, he takes up the styles of older masters, constantly reinventing himself and creating an enormously diverse oeuvre. At the same time, the humane attitude of this friendly yet perceptive Briton is honoured: his commitment to peace and friendship between the two war-torn cities of Coventry and Dresden.

In contrast to Yeadon, Max Uhlig stays in one place, from which he penetrates the objects that interest him. ‘For me, something becomes interesting when it becomes unfamiliar after looking at it for a long time, ’he said. He transformed the impression of real people and landscapes into the traces of an excitement; and he looks until the face appears as an impersonal cosmos.

In his characteristic style with translucent clusters of lines, he reveals the essence of the person portrayed. His paintings require ‘intellectual and sensual proximity, a direct counterpart’, as Dieter Hoffmann summarised the artist’s relationship to his motifs. Uhlig’s formal language still has a radical effect: both creating – in the viewer’s imagination – as well as striking through; erasing. In the 1980s, he developed an unmistakable visual language with which he has long since become a – much honoured – classic of 20th and 21st century German art. Loud and quiet, extroverted and internalised artistry meet with Yeadon and Uhlig. Nevertheless, there are similarities: Both moulded their respective art students through their personalities as well as their teaching. This includes the fact that Uhlig donated his home and studio to the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony in 2018 as an international artist residency alongside numerous works of art. The Coventry/Dresden Arts Exchange, founded by Yeadon, in turn enables the exchange of artists.

Both artists have now received FAMA Awards for this commitment and for their respective artistic life’s work.