Press


Cited from "Bildende Kunst", Issue 3 / 1966 (Herbert Letsch).

From wanting and from solutions. Another statement concerning the Bezirkskunstausstellung [district art exhibition] in Leipzig.


"Trying to shortly summarize the general impressions left by this important and
interesting cultural event, one might mention – above all – the gap between the
welcome intentions of many exhibiting artists and the solutions they have come
to [...] The extend of this discrepancy between aims and solutions of course
varies from case to case. While many solutions principally need to be acknowledged
because they depict personal emotional relationships that also reflect essential
properties of the socialist awareness of life, the solution of Ebersbach is totally
insufficient. His “Self portrait with friends” mirrors emotional relationships that are
absolutely irrelevant for the people as they fails to support people becoming aware
of their true position in life. The opposite is true: The picture serves to discredit
the socialist life in the mind of the observer. This painter has exhibited emotional
and psychological states that lack any positive societal meaning. In this view, the
painting overruns the border from a valid expression of an artist’s individuality
towards extreme individualism – the pure self expression of the isolated personality
of the artist himself. The picture reflects a personal, ideological relationship with life
that is full of the wrong belief that one’s own ego has priority over reality and that
this ego may be divided from life. In this regard, the picture is an example of both
poor and wrong originality: It lacks the commonly accepted truth and fails to display
the ideal of socialist thinking, feeling, and wanting. Nevertheless, one needs to
distinguish between the artistic facts themselves and the question of why a young
artist’s world view on our life is so strongly dominated by sceptical doubts and
individualistic self-mirroring"