To mark the artist's 70th birthday, the Kunstmuseum Ahlen presented a retrospective exhibition of around 100 works by Jobst Tilmann. The presentation provided an insight into a mature painterly oeuvre that is characterized by conceptual stringency and versatility.
The early works are based on shape phenomena and traces that Jobst Tilmann observed in French quarries. As a result of a fundamental questioning of his own creative activity, he soon arrived at a design completely independent of the natural model. In the 1990s, he created calm pictorial systems based on a consistent structure. The artist combines the tectonics of a clear orthogonal order with the organic nature of natural movement. His works on paper and paintings impress with their sensual balance between stability and vitality. From 2005, Jobst Tilmann's art heralded a paradigm shift. The previous dominance of uniformity and order is deliberately disrupted by opposing forces. An impulsive, strongly colored painting stands at the beginning of creative processes in which he reacts to organic processes with orderly interventions. In the midst of gray-toned “erasures”, formal islands with surprising appearances are formed, which the artist isolates through form cuts and approximates to the real world of the body as sculptural objects.
