Markus Döhne / Absolon Leather

Limburg, Germany 1961

Markus Döhne, a German artist living in Cologne, has created for Závodný Gallery a cycle of artworks inspired by the history of the South Moravian region. The primary sources of the presented works are photographic materials which the artist discovered in local historical archives.

The exhibition is named after Karel Absolon, renowned professor of paleoanthropology at Charles University in Prague, who in the first half of the 20th century stood behind a significant number of discoveries and researches. Among the most important are the archeological sites in Dolní Věstonice and speleological exploration in the Moravian Karst. Markus Döhne have used several pictures from professor Absolon’s archive a as a primary material for his works.

Döhne carefully studies the acquired photographic materials and documents. In various pictures, he seeks details and moments that are the most specific and characteristic of the moment and circumstances of its origin to the point they can be transferred to the present without losing its historical, social, existential or political urgency.

At the same time, these depictions of a concrete reality are taken out of their historical context. Some of them could have been a part of contemporary propaganda. So, what do they tell us, what are they hiding? And how do the viewers perceive and interpret them? How come they don’t lose any of their urgency despite the fact that the viewer often does not know anything about the details they relate to? What is the role of our memories here? And in what relation does it stand with our collective memory? Is it at all possible to correctly interpret the original context and meaning of the pictures?

Answers to these questions are difficult to find, but the visual urgency of the individual panels remains. Above all stays the unique process of work of the artist in which it is possible to find references to the means of medieval panel painting. Some of the works were created using gold or silver sheets. This can not only remind us of archetypal medieval iconography, but it also enhances a certain uniqueness of these works. The selected photographic motif is transferred to the panel in high resolution in the form of silk screen print, this creates a visual counterpart to the highly monochromatic lacquer coatings.

Each artwork has its own unique formatting which can consist of several plates of different sizes, often displaced from each other in the vertical or horizontal axis.

Markus Döhne is an artist who can transform reality into an artwork and an artwork into metaphysical questions of human consciousness and subconscious, with the faith that even on a purely visual level, the painting has its validity.