THE ART JOURNAL FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE, ART HISTORY, AND THOUGHT

Sighard Gille Is Still Painting
Rüdiger Steinhardt

At DOKUNST, we had wanted to take a closer look at Sighard Gille for some time. We knew his place in the history of Leipzig painting, his years as a teacher and his work at the Gewandhaus. But it was at the opening of ZeitBilder at the Elbland Kunsthalle in Riesa on April 11 that the need to understand him became pressing. Works from different decades hung before us. I moved from one painting to the next, seeing connections and then losing sight of them. How had this painter lived through the changes in his city and in his own work? How much of that could the paintings tell us? I wanted to speak with him.

Later, we visited Gille in his Leipzig studio. Paintings from different periods stood there, including some that had never been exhibited. Gille walked slowly through the room, stopped, picked something up and began to talk. He answered some of the questions I had come with before I could ask them. In the short video, he carries a heavy book of his work towards the camera. That small movement captures something about our visit: the studio was no place of mere retrospect. The paintings were there, old and new, and Gille was still engaged with them.

Until then, we had built our article largely around his historical importance. The visit made that version feel inadequate. To describe Gille only as a monument of Leipzig painting is to overlook the painter who still stands before a canvas today, wrestles with colour and follows an image without knowing in advance where it will lead. We rewrote the article from that realisation. It appears today in DOKUNST DOSSIERS. Our warm thanks go to Kerstin Herrlich for making our meetings with Sighard Gille possible.

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