'Robe 2' 2005, Acrylic and Egg Tempura on Canvas and Cotton Canvas, 210 x 160 cm
The leading theme of the artist’s interventions is the staging of temporality, transience, and change.
Fides Becker (* 1962) developed and pursued her picturesque strategies in the illusionistic pictorial space. Her practice explores intimate worlds through objects and materials we associate with the private sphere in everyday life. Sofas, beds, curtains, mirrors, and sheets are reconstituted in her paintings as fragments, details or dissolving surfaces that engage with the ambiguities between presence and absence, past and present, and personal and collective images.
Fides Becker (*1962 in Worms) studied at the Städel School in Frankfurt a.M., at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam, and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin.
Her works can be found in numerous national and international collections, such as the National Collection of Rhineland-Palatinate, the Art Collection of the German Bank, or the Stichting Beeldende Art Amsterdam.
Fides Becker lives in Frankfurt and Berlin.
Patina of the Time
The extraordinary artist and empirical cultural anthropologist Fides Becker, born in 1962, develops and pursues her painterly strategies in the large-format illusionistic picture space with a subversive play of light and color. In her pure painting on canvas, she reflects everyday objects, places, or rooms from other epochs with a mysterious patina, which are culturally connoted in our society. She inhales them with emotions and lends these dead objects an independent life. In this way, they receive something essential and at the same time morbid ambivalence, which makes the penetration of space and time experience in our present day reality.
Thus, Fides Becker inspired the old Jewish cemetery at the Börneplatz in Frankfurt and the Jewish cemetery in Berlin Weißensee, where the eternal peace of the dead can not be disturbed and the nature protects itself over the graves, to their large format “golem” landscapes The figure of the Jewish legend spreads in Central Europe. While the variants of the Berlin “Spiegelsaal” in Clara’s Ballhaus or the “Loge” evoke glamor and glory of former times, it moves with the almost romantic midnight blue Rhineland-Palatinate “dacha” under trees and the two leather canapés in the Contre Jour “of an English gentility club in private spheres.
Certainly man plays a central role with his feelings in the oeuvre of Fides Becker. Even though, in her recent works, she is more concerned with the recording of
human traces, following her studio scholarship at the Cité International des Arts Paris, that decisive transformation in her artistic work from 2010 to today has
been accomplished: for she turned from The collage technique, and pure painting, and since then renounced the human figure entirely in her pictures.
Nevertheless, she is still concerned with human sensations such as longing, desire, fear, but also lust and passion, which she wants to make sensual in her pictures.
In doing so, she does not pursue any new themes, but she is seeking a new approach to her well-known motifs - the beds, landscapes and interiors.
– Brigitta Amalia Gonser