I C A R C H 



 

 

 

A(nother) HOUSE FOR EMIL NOLDE

 

 

Was it just nostalgia that made the great painter Emil Nolde so sensitive to the “rural” aspects of life and art alike…?

In a certain way he was a Fundamentalist, and artist who searched for roots, not in the sky, but in the heavy, brown, deep, humid earth.

Yet once he contemplated building a house for himself together with Mies, but then it must have been that Mies who still had an “Expressionistic” side to him…

Nolde knew something about color, about the “telluric” qualities of color. There aren’t too many painters who understood the Expressionism of the Earth as much as he did, although his own blood, which was part Frisian, part Danish, might have had some connections with Van Gogh… but Nolde’s depth is very different than Vincent’s.

In a way, he was a “darker” painter than Vincent. Vincent van Gogh had a “dark” life, but his art is not “dark.”

Nolde’s life was much less difficult, although for a number of years he was interdicted to paint by the very party he was sympathetic towards, the Nazi party.

Strange how great artists, writers, and so on, “fell” at one point for the ideology of the Nazis… Nolde’s art was considered “degenerate,” yet at the beginning Nolde was highly sympathetic of the Nazis…

The naivete of artists…?

Perhaps…

But what counts is his art. Flowers and earthly fields and heavy skies coalesce in immensely deep, succulent paintings… deep and heavy.

How would another house for him look like…?

He designed a house himself, which is now a museum, with his works.

It is not a bad building.

But we ask you to further explore the possible architecture that might be imagined by contemplating his work.

When certain architects think that the future of architecture will not be gravitational, the works of Emil Nolde are as heavy and saturated with earth and earthiness as the most mountainous telluric architectures ever.

Is this the earth we intend to leave…?

And if yes, why…?

Explore heaviness. Explore depth. Explore earthiness. Explore humidity. Explore darkness. Explore an architecture that is Medieval and Modern at the same time, a task himself and the other members of Die Bruecke assigned to themselves.

Imagine “another house for Emil Nolde”… still on this earth, that we intend to leave…

Thank you,

ICARCH Gallery