From April 30, 2026, works from two of the artist's creative periods will be juxtaposed in the SELBANDER exhibition.
Dezernat5 - Galerie für aktuelle Kunst' is a producers' gallery in Schwerin. The owners are both gallery owners and artists. Udo Dettmann is a founding member and has been part of the Dezernat5 artists' collective for 15 years.
'SELBANDER' is an old German word that is rarely used today. Selbe (self) and ander (other) means together, together, together and comes from Middle High German. In the context of the exhibition, the term refers to the two creative phases of the artist, which are presented "selbander". Two periods, two forms of expression but one consciousness.
In the 1980s, Udo Dettmann's painting combined gestural realism with the expressive abstract tendencies of a modernism that approached the 'Neue Wilde' of the time on the one hand and had a penchant for the informal on the other: until 1987/88. As part of a scholarship at the Künstlerhaus Lauenburg/Elbe, he developed his own artistic solutions in his examination of the problem of the spatial effect in painting, which resulted in a distance and opposition to pure panel painting. He subsequently explored the interactive possibilities of real space. Box-shaped canvases, on which painting takes place in three dimensions, stood at the entrance to his artistic concept of space. Surface and space, moving image and object were and are the components from which the dialog arises. This universality of the means of expression indicates the complexity of sensory experience, which can be experienced in a slow process of perception.
