One Hundred Poets | Jürgen Partenheimer

"Like the poet who plays with the resonance of words, with the mere echoes of what they mean, Partenheimer approaches his subject matter at the very boundary of its corporeality, at the very point of transition between its materiality and its immateriality."

– Ivo Mesquita, chief curator for contemporary art, Pinacoteca Do Estado, São Paulo

"The poem and the image it holds within it reflect each other while at the same time inspiring a new image. Every work of art, every poem establishes between itself and its given reality an essential ‘space between’ which stands for what remains unsaid."

– Jürgen Partenheimer

"What happens in The One Hundred Poets is answering like with like in such a way that renders any effort at further speech superfluous. Perhaps the last word should go to Marianne Moore, who observed that: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.” What these works by Jürgen Partenheimer do is to respond to the poems he has chosen along lines that not only refuse to disturb that silence, but deepen and enrich it in ways that, as the genuine always does, strike us as both unexpected and strangely inevitable."

– John Burnside, Author und Poet

"Partenheimer perceives exhibition spaces as ‘centres of gravity’, sites where the “space between” unfolds to create a polymorphic image. His is a philosophical investigation, forming new models of representation that create series of alternative perceptions where the lyricism of the imagery challenges conventional interpretations of time and space."

– Nigel Prince, Director, Artes Mundi, Wales

"Jürgen Partenheimer’s visual world immediately captivates us via its floating, delicate ease, its disavowal of loud gestures and elaborate formats, its formal and tonal understatement. [...] In his oeuvre the artist succeeds uniquely in departing from the idea of an objectively experienced world, transforming it into a cognitive act of seeing."

– Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, Chefkuratorin Pinakothek der Moderne München

"Partenheimer's work invites you to not just unsee your surroundings but to practice being in a particular kind of space, where, within the work itself, the marks, shapes, spaces and colours must fall away, dematerialize and disentangle themselves from their own references. His work proposes a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of our experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible." 

– Aoife MacNamara, NSCAD University, Halifax, Canada