Joachim Böttcher - The graphic work
The sculptor, painter and draughtsman Joachim Böttcher died in October 2022. With his incorruptible approach to his work, which always maintained a balance between sensual information and intellectual consideration, he helped shape the Berlin and Dresden art landscape from the 1980s onwards and, like many others from this scene, cultivated an intensive relationship with Ahrenshoop. Born in Thuringia, he studied painting and graphic art at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from 1967 to 1972 after completing an apprenticeship and working as a stonemason. After a period as a freelance artist in Berlin and Dresden, he became a master student of the sculptor Werner Stötzer at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Since 1991, Böttcher has had his studio in Stabeshöhe/Uckermark, where he last lived. He enjoyed coming to the Baltic Sea and spending summer weeks on Hiddensee or Fischland. In 2007, he spent time working at the Künstlerhaus Lukas in Ahrenshoop.
In 2016, the art museum showed important paintings and sculptures in a personal exhibition. A large-format painting was donated to the collection by the artist. Before his death, Joachim Böttcher expressed the wish to also have a selection of his drawings in the Ahrenshoop Art Museum. The donation is the reason for this exhibition dedicated specifically to his drawings. A selection of 60 works will be shown. They are all illustrated in the catalog.
Böttcher was an outstanding draughtsman. Although his drawings are related to his paintings and sculptures, they are never merely sketchy preparatory works for paintings or sculptures. Rather, they reflect processes of definition that stand on their own and fed his work as a whole. They focus on the bodies of people and landscapes, which in his compositions are indicated, outlined and shaded with a pencil, sometimes painted in color, more often underlaid with material and sometimes taking on musical traits. They unfold on fields with a lost history, communicate their tension to them and remain in limbo in one way or another. It is the fine line of the present, the border between happening and remembering, which is adequately reflected in Böttcher's art of drawing.
