Ben Willikens

His mostly precisely composed, large-format paintings, with deserted spaces as their main motif, made Ben Willikens (*1939) famous in the second half of the 1970s. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue present nearly 50 works created between 1971 and 2021 and thus span the artist’s entire oeuvre. Three groups of works form the central pillars: the Anstaltsbilder of the 1970, in whose motifs Willikens processes a dark chapter in his life, and the series ORTE (PLACES) And ORTE 2 (PLACES 2), which deal with Willikens’s examination of the architecture of the National Socialist period. There are also various works from the series Raume der Moderne (Spaces of Modernity). Text in English and German. AUTHOR: Ben Willikens was born in Leipzig in 1939. He studied painting with Heinz Toerkes at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart in the early 1960s. In 1969, at the age of 30, Willikens entered a clinic due to poor health. His stay there lasted one and a half years - a life-changing experience that the artist has processed in many of his works. Willikins had his first solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tubingen in 1975. In 1977, he became famous around the world with his Leonardo Da Vinci-inspired work, Last Supper, and was appointed as a professor at the Fachhochschule fur Gestaltung in Pforzheim the same year. As of 1991, he held the professorship of painting and graphic design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, of which he was also the president from 1999 to 2004. SELLING POINTS: . An overview of Ben Williken’s oeuvre between 1971 and 2021, presenting nearly 50 works, mostly precisely composed, large-format paintings, with deserted spaces and architecture 55 colour illustrations