The vitality of water in between dream and reality.
Looking at the works of the artist Christian Awe, who lives in Berlin and Palma de Mallorca, you are instantly overwhelmed. This is not only due to the enormous dimensions of some works, up to several hundred square meters, but also to the power of color and dynamism that they radiate.
For Christian Awe, color is like an elixir of life, it’s a passion. With unique lightness and painterly virtuosity, Awe combines colors and forms, creating moments of freedom and joie de vivre for the viewer. Abstract forms draw a special degree of movement that literally pushes out of the pictures and makes their surface tactile. In this way, Awe repeatedly explores the limits of painting.
In his “water paintings” series, he creates works that give the impression of real drops wetting the painting surface. In a masterlful play of light and shadows, Awe blurs the boundaries between imagination and reality. The viewer is tempted to touch the pictures and thus adjust the visual perception of reality. Awe’s threedimensional-looking color landscapes appear photorealistic, almost as if they were printed. However, every drop of water, no matter how small, is painted.
In addition, energetic streams of color, powerful splashes, and apparently spontaneous, airy gestures form an exciting symbiosis in a dialogue between spontaneity, experiment and artistic calculation. They unite to form poetically pulsating color worlds that sweep the viewer away into a cosmos of colors and emotions.
Awe’s complex works are bursting with life-affirming colors and impress with their radiance and finely nuanced vitality. With a view to the big picture, the artist works with surprising mastery, precision, and attention to detail. From a distance, his paintings exert an almost intoxicating fascination and attraction. On closer inspection, they captivate with the meticulous precision with which Awe perfects even the smallest detail, which gives his works their own unique rhythm and depth of space.
Christian Awe’s works invite the viewer to an inspiring journey of the senses, to see and feel something new again and again. Explosive, but also controlled; powerful, but at the same time full of sensitivity and lightness.
This applies both to his works on canvas and paper as well as to his works in public spaces, in which he repeatedly takes on sociopolitical themes such as freedom, tolerance, cosmopolitanism and a feeling of solidarity. He is never accusatory, quite the opposite, he invites an open dialogue.
With his murals, Awe wants to make art tangible in public spaces and on the street, so that people can react to it immediately. For him, art is the cement that holds society together and advances it. That’s why to him it is so important to give something back to society. With the proceeds from the edition of his mural “Adanzé” (translated from various West African dialects it means: “A warm welcome”) he built, for example, a school and a hospital building in Burkina Faso (West Africa). During the refugee crisis of 2016, the edition of his mural “Begegnung” (“encounter”), commissioned by the state government of Lower Saxony, made a significant contribution to supporting unaccompanied children and young people who had fled to Germany.
“Christian Awe is an artist who wants to touch people with his works and invites them to embark on a journey of emotions and dreams. But he also has something to say and tries to make the world a little better through his opportunities”
