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BETWEEN

GAN-ERDENE TSEND – BETWEEN

28 FEBRUARY – 25 APRIL 2015

OPENING, FRIDAY, 27 FEBRUARY 2015, 6 – 9 pm

The reflection in a puddle of water shows beside a young woman a companion that astonishingly is missing in the depicted »reality« of the pictorial scene; people and animals are lost in the endless expanse of a great, unspoiled nature, but it seems to be that the nature gave them security and protection. Always leads us the art of Gan-Erdene Tsends into a world which hides in itself something mysterious, something quietly asking, a world, which shows an almost divine truth.

This intensity and magic power generates the artist from the »BETWEEN«, the invisible space between the two different worlds: a material one that belongs to the reality of the depicted person, and an ideal one, which takes place in the mind, the imagination and the memory of man. Arise from the base of this conception his pictures reflect an inner, spiritual world of experience, in which he discusses the universal and existential questions of mankind such as love and separation, war and peace, birth and death. The opposition of these two worlds, the outer and the inner one, in one work offers Gan-Erdene Tsend the opportunity to project thoughts and feelings onto the canvas. The invisible is manifested in the visible. Thereby, his paintings are animated by an almost internalized charisma and you can feel that they – like the artist says himself – »come from the heart.«

The art of Gan-Edene Tsend is always a reflection of his own experiences of life, which are also deeply imbued with the polarities of two self experienced worlds. Far away from his home particularly his childhood determine his pictorial work. Born in 1979 in Mongolian Murun, Gan-Edene Tsend spent his early years in the mountains and in the wide steppes next to the Gobi Desert. Amidst this almighty nature, he lived the traditional nomadic life of the Mongols. He grew up with his grandparents in the typical felt yurts and there, listened to the wondrous stories and tales of his grandmother. All these impressions of his childhood have left a deep mark in him and they are now reflected in one way or another in his art. Another important turning point in the artist’s life was his move to Germany, where he studied at the Art Academy in Münster (NRW) and where he got in contact to a complete strange culture for the first time in his life.

This meeting of two worlds, the Mongolian and the German one, means for Gan-Erdene Tsend the rediscovery and renewed appreciation of the Mongolian nature and its laws. As a result, the depicting of nature and the living in it becomes the central subject of his art. These natural experiences of Gan-Erdene Tsend appear in his paintings in a deserted infinity of his pure landscapes. Like a visual Vertigo – an iridescence and fibrillation of colors – he transmits his own natural experiences in fine, sometimes pointillist speckled colors. He describes point by point, with the whole spectrum of color the forces of nature and their atmospheric temper of air and light and, in doing so, transforms the natural space for us in a meditative place of refuge.

Besides that, he conceives landscapes whose opposition of nature and the people and animals living in it articulates political and social statements. In the picture »Friends« ( 2014), a boy is riding with his horses in a landscape that seems completely dissolve in the yellow-green-blue haze. The animals nestle closely together, in whose unity the security of the extended family becomes apparent. The social cohesion creates strength, thus offering the family members a place of refuge. In this regard, horses form a similar group as the human within his family structure. But at the same time the immaterial blurring of the surrounding landscape implies the lost and with that the fragility of this close family structure. In subtle hints Gan-Erdene Tsend indicats the threat to the traditional family unit by our current social changes.

Another important issue in the oeuvre of Gan-Erdene Tsend is his so-called ›reflection‹. Based on the divergence between the actual pictorial image and the mirror scene – depicted in the picture – he relates to each other two different levels of reality, a real one and an imagined one. In the mirror image appears always a creature – a person or an animal – which is missing in the depicted pictorial reality. In this context, the artists articulates in the ›reflections‹ explicitly the meaning of change, loss and separation for the people. Because of the difference between that, what is and that, what was, or will be, or could be, in the ›picture in picture‹ appears precisely that what we have lost and what we miss. Through the incorporeal of the mirror image the visionary or fictitious dimension of the reflection is once again pointed out. Like this, the ›mirror image‹ is always the reflection of a thought, and therefore the map or rather the imagination of memory.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1979 in Murun/Mongolia, Gan-Erdene Tsend grows up in his early years with his grandmother, who live the traditional nomadic life in the mountains and steppes on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Between 1996 and 2001 he studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. From 2003 to 2010 he attended the Art Academy in Münster in the class of Prof. Hermann-Josef Kuhna, who appoints him to his master student in 2007. First esteem he already learned in 2006, where he received the Art Prize for Young Art in Herne, and 2012, where he was awarded the Europe-famous Art Prize Wesseling. For several years Gan-Erdene Tsend is continuously represented regionally and nationally in numerous group and solo exhibitions and consequently, his art received more and more attention.

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