Helmut Dorner lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany. He studied at the School of Fine Arts of Düsseldorf under Gerhard Richter between 1976 and 1982 and he has been teaching at the School of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe since 1989. Dorner’s abstract vision of painting has led him to work in two ways: first, gesturally, based on overlaying thick layers of material and secondly, with multiple layers of lacquer that allow a repeated motif to be discerned; both reinforce the objectual character of his oeuvre. Although Dorner’s work in the 1980s was characterised by the use of canvas or wood as supports, since 1990 he has replaced them for a less traditional support – metacrylics – which establishes a link between his paintings and the surface on which they hang. His work has been an object of one-man and group exhibitions in Europe and the United States at Carré d’Art, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes (1991), FRAC d’Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand (2000), Fundação Serralves in Oporto (2004) and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2006), among others.
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