8 DEATH IN THE GARDEN A meadow in gleaming pink with purple blossoms, behind a likewise purple grove of thin tree trunks, arranged as on art nouveau wallpaper, to one side a gently swung light-blue curtain with white crossberry flowers and red leaves. And then a black monument – a tapering pedestal bearing the silhouette of a crouching figure in a net, surrounded by a gaudily flickering halo of light. Enclosing it all a flat, black wooden frame with bronzed bead and reel – jetsam from other times. That is Beate Hornig’s reverse glass painting DEATH IN THE GARDEN from the year 2003 (Städtische Museen Zittau, p. 1). Elegiac and yet with a stupendous luminosity and blaze of colour. Death as a shade and shining light at one and the same time? The garden as a favoured place and dream landscape? In its motifs, coloration and technique, at any event, it is a picture that is characteristic of Beate Hornig’s oeuvre, in which she explores the possibilities for artistic expression offered by reverse glass painting. In her work, materials and techniques are never an end in themselves but a means to an end – to giving a powerful imagination its appropriate form and providing a platform for the fragility of human sensitivities and states of mind. For this purpose, fragile glass as a painting support is just the thing. Beate Hornig’s concern is for the poetic, the unfathomable. For images that she seeks and finds within herself. That one significant work of hers bears the title FOUND (p. 78/79) is thus absolutely characteristic: a white doe with a red neckband resting on a carpet of flowers before the corner of a wall but surrounded by shot-holes – found and targeted? As also in the case of the BEAUTIFUL ANIMAL (p. 1, 56), which is grazing unsuspectingly in a forest clearing and there offers a target for a violet-coloured shot-gun that is poking out from behind one of the trees. In Beate Hornig’s pictures, death is often a lurking presence, in a wide variety of forms and in surprising constellations. WITHOUT WORDS – SILENT THEATRE (p. 95) However enchanting and colourful many of these scenes may appear, on closer inspection they reveal themselves to be eerie, cruel, or sarcastic. The artist has a strong sense of humour and irony. In most cases, as she herself states, she draws wittily on her own repertoire of motifs: “I prefer to steal this or that past element quietly, stealing also from myself, and then transform it into something new.” At times, however, she also takes up stories from mythology – such as that of Icarus (IN FREE FALL, p. 92/93) or of Charon (GOODBYE; CROSSING III, p. 9) – or from Christian iconography (ALAS, ST WILGEFORTIS, p. 89). She draws inspiration from reading, for example from the poems of Sarah Kirsch, and from music such as the ethereal sounds of Arvo Pärt, or responds to impulses from contemporary art, from Gerhard Richter, for instance, with whom she is biographically linked in that both earned their first spurs as set-designers and decorators at the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Theater in Zittau. Secrets – Approaches to the Pictorial World of Beate Hornig Marius Winzeler
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