Helmut Rieger, Eros and Death

A German Expressionist
Helmut Rieger, born in 1931, explored various German avant-garde schools before returning to figurative painting.
For his first solo exhibition in Paris, the Polad-Hardouin Gallery has selected a series of works from the period 1983-1993, when Helmut Rieger explored the possibilities of bichrome painting (black and white, with occasional touches of red), which enabled him to attain remarkably powerful peaks of expression.
Working on plastic film mounted on wood or under glass, Helmut Rieger used a paint spray gun of the sort used to re-spray cars. The shiny paint gives his work a striking varnish and depth. Drawing on a wide range of artistic and cultural references, the paintings depict intriguing scenes of war, or maybe a fiendish, trance-like African dance, haunted by the spectre of Death and his shadow, Eros.
The gallery has published a catalogue to mark the exhibition.