It’s Day 303 and I’m feeling slightly under the weather…hopefully it’s just allergies and not a cold or flu…I have shows coming up that I don’t want to miss!  My friend Jon told me about today’s artist and lent me a book of his and I love his work.  It was really challenging finding much information on him online AND it was difficult to paint in his style…but it was very inspiring and thought-provoking.  I love the images and people he portrays.  Join me in honoring Robert Indermaur today!  I did find a small biography on his website.

Robert Indermaur

Born 1947 in Chur / Graubünden.

I went to school in Chur until completion at the Grisons teacher seminar in 1967.

In the following years I was traveling with friends across Europe, Asia and Africa.

In between, I taught as a primary school teacher in St.Antönien, Passugg, Domat / Ems and Chur.

With my future wife and a few friends I founded in 1974 in Chur, the first small theater (Klibühni Schnidrzunft) in Graubünden, which we initiated ten years and accompanied.

30 years ago I began to make my favorite activity to the profession. First, as an abstract, then as a figurative painter and sculptor later I showed my works at more than one hundred solo and many group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad.

In 1977, the graphic artist Albert Brun and I, six issues of the satirical magazine

“The ball horn” out.

I am married since 1975. My wife, Barbara, gave birth to our three children, daughter Rebecca and their two sons Alexander and Adrian.
I have different sculptures and murals for public spaces – created and for three theater productions the stage.

1989/90 we spent a year in California / USA. Otherwise, since 1983, we live in Almens / GR. I work there – and from 2004 also in my second studio in the neighboring village Paspels.

Biography is from www.indermaur.net.  The translation is kind of wonky, but understandable!

Below is text transcribed from the book that was loaned to me.  Robert Indermaur- Departure (Bilder 1983-1989) I wanted to include more information. 🙂 Photos are also from the same book.

Excerpts from Ambiguous Dramas, Tangible Dreams: The Art of Robert Indermaur- By Katherine Gregor

Robert Indermaur’s paintings capture this bittersweet quality of human experience in a powerful, wonderfully visual fashion.  His work makes the unspoken tangible; in his odd, often mysterious images we instinctively recognize our own internal doubts, perceptions, moods, anxieties.  Indermaur’s world of muted palettes and deep shadows, isolated individuals, empty rooms, and ambiguous drams

seems to map a kind of universal psychological terrain.  The searching characters at the center of this world, who carry on and look for meaning despite the oddness of their circumstances, serve as our allegorical stand-ins, so that ultimately these paintings portray not individuals but something larger and more tentative – the difficulties and tensions of being human.

Many of these paintings are strongly narrative, literary, even theatrical.  They tell us stories, complete with characters and settings and dramatic tension, but their tales are strange, absurdist, incomplete; they provoke our need to explain.

In other works Indermaur explores the idea of the theater of man – Humans on display in another sense, by their own choice.  An audience is almost never visible in these works; the issue seems to be the individual’s act of exposure, the experience of being publicly “on stage”.

Through works like these, Indermaur stimulates us to think deeply about the experience of being human.  Sometimes these paintings suggest the artist’s own conclusions; more often they pose open-ended questions, merely hinting at shades of meaning. To solve the puzzles of these paintings present, we must supply pieces of ourselves.

~

I hope you enjoy my piece today.  It was much more difficult that I initially thought it was going to be this morning.  I couldn’t quite get the brushstrokes right and if I was feeling better, I could spend more time on it, but I think it turned out well enough.  I really like the concept of my piece and I hope you do too!

I will see you tomorrow on Day 304!  Whew, I can’t believe I haven’t missed a day this year yet!  Knock on wood.  Knock knock.

 

Best,

Linda