Dialoge: Matthias Mansen – Sammlung Rolf Horn

Two years after the Rolf Horn Collection was featured at the Brücke Museum in Berlin, the contemporary Berlin artist Matthias Mansen is now a guest at the Rolf Horn Collection. His expansive woodcuts are in dialogue with the works of classical modernism, with the woodcuts of the "Brücke" as well as with the works of Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann or Alexej von Jawlensky, with the paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Otto Mueller.
More than 25 years ago, Matthias Mansen turned to woodcuts, which he regarded as an independent artistic medium from the very beginning. He thus follows in the footsteps of the artists of the "Brücke", who rediscovered woodcut as a medium a good hundred years earlier.
Like most of the expressionist prints, Mansen's large-format woodcuts are hand-made prints made by the artist himself. He uses found objects, an old door or the board of a cupboard, wood he finds on the street, as a printing block. In this way, not only the grain of the wood, but also the traces of earlier use and wear enter into the work of art. They become a creative element and at the same time an indication of the change and transience of things. Mansen's starting point in terms of content is visible reality. Therefore, his works can be assigned to the classical genres of painting - figure, portrait, interior, landscape, seascape.