references
Dr. Gundula S. Caspary M.A. | art historian | Museum Siegburg/Germany | 2021
Gabriele Musebrink – Paintings beyond willpower?!
„(…) To understand the complexity of existence, an awake and sensitive mind is needed, a tireless curiosity and a capacity to analyze and reflect upon what is being seen, experienced, known, and understood as ‘the self’. Yet, this way of thinking, which mainly belongs to the western cultural hemisphere, has its limitations. It is at least only one of many potential ways to experience the world and existence itself. Eastern spiritual traditions include both sensory and mental spheres of perception in the comprehension of the world and thereby represent a deeper and more holistic understanding of one’s own existence in the context of the great mystery. Gabriele Musebrink has already dedicated herself for many years to the philosophy of ZEN, its spiritual teachings and the expansion of awareness. The knowledge about the interrelation of all visible and invisible forces has been with her since ‘the beginning’.
Consequently, her work mixes aspects that are perceived as opposite poles in the western canon, but are actually interrelated from an eastern perspective: Existence and non-existence, becoming and decaying, light and shadow, density and transparency, spherical lightness and earthy masses, materiality and sensuality. These ideas and conceptions of interwoven realities manifest also in the artworks of Gabriele Musebrink. (…)“
Kirsten Müller | art historian | Essen/Germany | 2019
‘Peaceful Signs’ – A Project for Inner Peace
“Gabriele Musebrink has initiated an art project that is being carried out together with three other women. In this project, drawings evolve that are 30 x 30 cm in size. Thick, handmade paper is torn into sized pieces and serves as a surface onto which natural materials are applied. This is characteristic for the Intuitive Process Painting of Gabriele Musebrink.
The project ‘Peaceful Signs’ focuses more on the process, less on the result; in present, peaceful interaction, the women work on single steps until the completion of the drawings, trying to be fully present and connected with themselves as well as with others. ‘Peace originates within one’s self’ (G. M.) (…)“
Marzenna Guzowska | Art Critic | Warsaw/Poland | 2018
On the road without luggage
“(…) The material originating directly from nature is inalterably being conserved. It is not sublimed and there is no contamination. The material is not only means of creation of the artwork itself but represents a part that is intrinsically tied to it. The extraordinary perception of such an abstract work is based on and comes with a feeling of the existence of reality. (…)“
Anita Brockmann | Art Historian and Production Manager Book | Witten/Germany | 2014
Change is the only constant
„(…) Gabriele Musebrink creates images which transform the classical landscape in an abstract manner - or appear to. Her imageries step out of the visual plane. They show vivid, relief-like surfaces with strongly developed structures, broken, sometimes rough with deep cracks and fine fissures. Their tactile expression almost forces you to explore them with your hands. (…)“
Gisela Schmoeckel | Art historian | Remscheid/Germany | 2009
“(…) Gabriele Musebrink's paintings stay on our minds and are not forgotten easily. Not only technically does the artist deal with the shaping forces in art, but equally in Zen meditation practice, she investigates the transcendental dimension of reality. This can be found reading the tracks of her artworks and in the unique gesture of her artistic intervention.
So luckily, you can all move around here in this house and in Hasten over and over again and discover deeper levels of the primeval world of creative energy.”
Kirsten Müller | art historian | Essen/Germany | 2004
"Sensitive, enraptured, ambiguous, but powerful, impulsive, determined – characteristic for the works of Gabriele Musebrink is that they always reflect both poles that belong to each nature, that they neither neglect one side nor the other. (...) and by their constant moving to and from they reproduce their unity as an entirety constantly anew (...).
So being outside of time and spirit of time, as well as being outside of (in the sense of art history) attempts to categorize Musebrink´s work deals with and reflects the universal lawfulness of nature and the questions of men. As we experience different stages, phases and processes within the span of life and death, in which things are constantly changing, because life means movement and also change, Gabriele Musebrink´s paintings, most of them being done by (Spatula) merely are the momentary result deriving from the once noticed traces, that materialize themselves into a new shape, through the artist, as she herself describes this process of transformation. Each one of her paintings therefore is a condensation coagulated at this unique and not repeatable moment, which only has its validity in that very moment."
Prof. Werner Nekes | Mülheim(Ruhr)/Germany | 1996
"At a time, in which the German "established" painters are drumming up so loudly in the media that their noise is earsplitting, it often is difficult to detect the fine sounds at all. One cannot be but surprised that through all this fuss such silent works like those of Twombly, Kirkeby or Raetz are noticed and estimated according to their true value at all. It gives us great satisfaction and creates hope ... (Gabriele Musebrink´s) paintings require patience, a second, a third look before they unfold themselves in their intensity (...) nothing, not even the colours that shape the painting, are self-evident. They are material – aesthetic consequences, enforced by the subject. (...) The illusionistic picture is stripped of its concreteness, an archetypical manifestation so becomes visible. Pictures breathe the freshness of newly fallen snow. Abstraction´s modes of expression hereby are being extended in favour of a graphism of poetry, a writing down of generally applicable structures of thinking."
A.S. Ionescu | Journalist der Zeitung „Cotidiann“ | Bukarest/Rumänien | 1995
„Gabriele Musebrink chooses a mode of expression at times uncontrolled, then again very careful, not to exceed the limits of painting. She conveys a universe in constant transformation, the bubbling up of lava, torrential thunder storms, cruel Aeolian powers in furious agitation. (...)“
Penes | Journalist der Zeitung „Vremea“ | Bukarest/Rumänien | 1995
„Jedenfalls stellt die Ausstellung einen wahrhaft künstlerischen Akt dar, diese sechsundzwanzig Bilder, die unter dem leicht unwägbaren und zeitlosen Titel ‘Efemeride‘ (Vergänglichkeit) stehen, die das Auge des Besuchers zu einem unbequemen und widersprüchlichen Dialog provozieren, zu Themen, die immer schon das Denken der Menschen bewegt haben, wie zum Beispiel: das Gegenwärtige und das Ewige, das Vergängliche und das Dauerhafte, der Mensch und sein Schicksal, das Gute und das Schlechte, das Schöne und das Hässliche, das ‘was sein würde und was nicht sein würde‘. (…) Das Universum, das uns die Künstlerin vorstellt, ist ein ganz persönliches Universum, aber in unser Universum als Gesamtheit integriert, in dem die wichtigsten Elemente der Natur, Wasser und Feuer, Erde und Luft sehr stark gekennzeichnet werden. Deshalb sagten wir, dass die Malerei der Künstlerin keine ‘gegenständliche‘ Malerei ist, sondern eine der Ideen, in denen sich ‘das Auge, dass nach außen geschlossen ist, nach innen wach wird‘. (…)“