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

Sighard Gille – The Uneasy Continuity of Leipzig Painting

A comprehensive examination of Sighard Gille’s work and his place within the East German art scene and German art in the years that followed.

DOSSIERS

Rüdiger Steinhardt

In the studio stands a self-portrait that offers the viewer little reassurance. One eye seems to meet our gaze more openly than the other. Pink, violet, blue and yellow run across the forehead, cheeks and nose; the colours do not assemble a settled face but keep its features in motion. Behind the head, grey stripes alternate with short fields of yellow. The man in the dark jacket is recognisable, yet the painting offers no comforting answer to who he is. Sighard Gille does not paint himself as a certainty.

Someone meeting Gille for the first time may already know one of his works. Above the foyer of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus stretches Gesang vom Leben (Song of Life), a ceiling painting of more than 700 square metres, executed in 1980 and 1981. You can stand beneath it and still never see it all at once. But the work’s fame comes at a cost: it can fix its maker in the role of creator of a public monument, although his work has grown far more varied, private and resistant to easy interpretation in the years since. The self-portrait in the studio suggests another place to begin. It shows an artist who treats his own appearance no more as a finished form than he does the city with whose painting his name is bound up.

Born in Eilenburg in 1941, Gille came to art through photography. From 1965 to 1970 he studied at Leipzig’s Academy of Fine Arts with Bernhard Heisig and Wolfgang Mattheuer; later, he became Heisig’s master student in East Berlin. Those names do not describe a unified school in the sense of a shared style. Heisig’s dramatic painting, charged with history, and Mattheuer’s differently tempered pictorial world offered young artists distinct answers to what a representational image could do. In that environment, Gille learned to take the figure, narrative painting, drawing and the history of painting seriously. He did not inherit a ready-made vocabulary. Even the works that first brought him recognition demand a closer distinction between what an image is meant to show and what it actually brings into view.

The Gewandhaus is revealing in this respect. The commission arose from the GDR’s ambition to present its new concert hall, in visual terms too, as a space of humanist and socialist musical culture. That brief belongs to the history of Gesang vom Leben. To ignore it would smooth over the conditions in which the painting was made. To see nothing else would miss the painter’s work. Orchestra, city, lovers, death and shadowy figures move across sloping ceilings, forming new constellations as the viewer walks beneath them. The official expectation of a positive image of humanity is present, but it does not dispel the threatening or the grotesque. The scale of the architecture makes the painting public; its shifting sightlines deny it the straightforward legibility of a poster.

A work like this shows why the familiar question of conformity or resistance explains too little on its own. The painting was made for a state institution, within a specific political commission. Its quality must nevertheless be judged in the images themselves, rather than by granting it a retrospective certificate of moral innocence. Gille tells a story of life and lets disturbances enter it. We should neither romanticise them as covert opposition nor dismiss them as mere decoration of a prescribed message. The friction between the two is part of the painting’s historical substance.

The works in the studio shift the scale. In one large painting, figures press into one another; blue-rimmed eyes and mask-like faces emerge among bodies painted pink, orange and grey. A pale figure bends in the foreground, while the others, above and behind it, refuse to settle into any stable distance from one another. Community does not appear here as harmonious togetherness. It is an experience of closeness, overlap and possible oppression. The painting gives no face enough rest for us to regard it merely as a sign of a social role. Gille sees people in relation to one another, but he does not make those relations look agreeable.

This is also a matter of artistic conviction. Speaking about his work, Gille said that he had known early on he would rather express himself through drawing and painting than through speech. He spoke of concentrating on the process of making a work and of allowing its course to lead him down paths he had not foreseen. The variety of his work, he noted, could even be a problem for gallery owners. There is more to this than an anecdote about an artist’s temperament. The art world wants to recognise a signature style, give it a name and find it again. Gille allows each new work to call the previous one into question. In the studio, figuration stands beside free brushwork, small formats beside expansive scenes, without any one of them displacing the others as a final answer.

His path after 1989 makes this restlessness particularly visible. For artists who had trained and spent part of their careers in the GDR, political change also altered the places where they exhibited, the judgements passed on their work and the expectations placed upon them. Their art was often viewed through a single question: how much of the state did it contain? Gille kept working, but he did not simply continue a programme he had already established. He made sculptures, worked with photography, travelled, and in the 1990s let his paint become thicker and, in places, less constrained. This cannot be reduced to the comforting account of an artist who remained the same despite everything. The act of continuing changed what his painting could become.

A landscape in the studio shows how little a recognisable subject obliges him to preserve a recognisable order. Houses and groups of trees lie on the distant horizon; below them, turquoise, green and yellow push into glowing reds and oranges. The foreground threatens to lose its contours. We can read the scene as a landscape while watching it emerge from decisions about colour that refuse to serve the description of a place. Anyone who sees Gille chiefly as a guardian of figurative tradition must look more closely at a painting like this. Its origins remain perceptible, but the painter is free to put their certainties at risk.

The Leipzig School is often told as though a straight line ran from Heisig, Mattheuer and Tübke to the international careers of the so-called New Leipzig School. Gille’s biography crosses that line and makes it more complicated. He was teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts before the end of the GDR, took charge of a painting class in 1989 and became a professor in 1992. Artists who studied in his class include Matthias Weischer, Tobias Lehner, Sebastian Gögel, Paule Hammer, Cornelia Renz and Kristina Schuldt. Their paintings differ from one another and from his. That is precisely why the nature of his influence is worth examining.

A teacher is not the hidden co-author of a student’s paintings. Nor was the New Leipzig School the creation of a single professor; the term itself packages disparate kinds of painting into a convenient public label. Gille’s significance lies elsewhere. He taught in a city where composition, drawing and work with the figure had been learned, challenged and relearned across generations. After 1989, that knowledge encountered new freedoms, new institutions and eventually an international market that discovered Leipzig as a label of origin. Attending the same academy does not produce a common style. It does, however, make it possible for artistic experience to be passed on even as the images that grow from it contradict one another.

How far Gille takes this freedom in his own paintings—in portraiture, in an image of death and in his recurring work on the human face

Continued from the print edition

Gille himself recalled Heisig asking his students what they would do if they were forbidden to paint. Later, Gille put the same question to his own class. There is no need to romanticise its existential force as a teaching method. Its seriousness is revealing nonetheless: painting appears here as an activity to which someone must give time, attention and responsibility, even though the result cannot simply be deduced from an intention. This is a human connection between teacher and students that needs neither sentimental notions of family nor an art-historical line of succession.

When Leipzig again came to be seen as a centre of distinctive painting on the international art market in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this slower history was hard to tell. The market needs names, recognisable images and a moment of discovery. Teaching consists of repeated work, correction, approval, disagreement and the time it takes a young artist to arrive at a decision of their own. These processes cannot be photographed like an exhibition opening or credited to an individual sale. They nevertheless shape what becomes possible in an art city. Gille belongs to that history without being contained by it: his students explain his paintings no more than his paintings explain theirs.

Perhaps drawing speaks most directly to this double existence as painter and teacher. A substantial selection from his sketchbooks and a body of thousands of drawings was published in 2024. The number alone proves little; what matters is the working practice it allows us to glimpse. A face, a gesture or a movement does not become important only when it appears in a finished painting. It is noticed, recorded, discarded and taken up again. This kind of attention cannot be passed to another person as a style. But one can show them that images grow out of such decisions. Those who know Gille only through the Gewandhaus ceiling encounter here the scale on which a painter works every day. Those who know him only as the teacher of artists who later found success encounter the work from which his authority in the classroom grew.

The relationships are not necessarily simpler on a smaller scale. In one work, a narrow figure wrapped in lines stands among other figures; black strokes push across the scene, while areas of red and blue interrupt the space rather than define it. It would be tempting to identify the central figure at once as a victim and turn the painting into a complete story. But the sparse drawing, abrupt colour and unstable shifts of scale resist such a resolution. Gille lets something happen without offering us the secure position of an uninvolved observer.

The difficulty of looking becomes clearer still before a painting that, as we were told in the studio, is connected to the death of Gille’s sister. A pale figure lies in a coffin set at an angle to the picture plane. To the right sits a bowed person, hands close together; a skeleton hovers above them, with a light-coloured bird nearby. The scene contains signs that could easily be made into an allegory. Yet the slanting coffin brings the dead woman disturbingly close, while the seated figure, heavy in its physical presence, remains with a duration that no symbol can abbreviate. The bird and skeleton do not explain the loss. They make visible the search for forms when direct depiction is not enough.

Here we see what it might mean to speak of the human in Gille’s work without wearing the word out as praise. His interest in humanity does not consist in wrapping every figure in compassion. He can crowd bodies, exaggerate faces and place the dead within an unsettled pictorial order. Closeness offers no guarantee of reconciliation. That is precisely why it carries weight. In the painting of his sister, private grief is neither put on display for effect nor shielded from view by a smooth formula of dignity. The painter works towards a form for something that cannot be repaired.

The portraits, too, deny their subjects an easy identity. The self-portrait on the cover brings forth a face through decisively placed colours and, at the same time, disrupts its wholeness. In another painting, a man’s head in a hat seems to grow out of an earthy surface from which slender shoots emerge. His face looks out as the plants surround him and draw him into another order. Without reliable information about the title or sitter, it would be wrong to assign the painting a particular person or message. What is visible is enough: the subject appears both as an individual and as part of a cycle that the painting refuses to reduce to a pleasing metaphor.

The six works from the studio do not constitute a representative selection from an oeuvre spanning decades. Together, however, they expose a contradiction concealed by the easy talk of Gille’s “loyalty to the figure.” The figure endures here not because its outlines remain unchanged. It is set in motion: in the press of bodies in the group paintings, under the weight of loss, in the painter’s own face, at the threshold between body and plant life. Even the landscape, seemingly without people, bears the marks of a hand unwilling to accept the visible world as something already complete. For Gille, persistence in painting does not mean standing still.

From here, the relationship between Leipzig’s generations can be described differently. What a teacher passes on is not always a form one can recognise in the work of younger artists. Sometimes it is permission to take a learned form seriously enough to put it at risk. Whether and how individual students made use of that possibility would have to be examined in their paintings. Gille himself has long tried to make the case through his own work. His Gewandhaus painting and the later works do not stand at the beginning and end of a line; they challenge one another: the public image of life and the intimate depiction of a death; the architecture of a major commission and the wilful scale of a portrait; learning together and the decisions each painter must make alone.

To reduce Gille to a mediator between two schools is to strip his painting of its independence. To look only at his pictures, without considering his years of teaching and the academy’s political history, is to miss why his work holds a particular significance for Leipzig. Both belong to the account. His paintings do not provide convenient illustrations for a story about the city whose conclusion has already been settled. They compel that story to become more precise. And his teaching does not make him the father of a succeeding generation, but an artist who accompanied others as they worked on paintings of their own.

In the self-portrait, the gaze remains open and uneven. Perhaps that is the right place to begin any encounter with Gille: to recognise a face without claiming to have exhausted it; to know a history without declaring it complete. In the studio, Leipzig’s story is still being written. Gille continues to paint it.