Here on this pages are some of my works from the last thirty years, mostly oil or acrylic on canvas. Many of my paintings are integrated into series. i take up from time to time again, others stand alone as some kind of short storys.
From the very beginning my works revolve around the determination of the position and localization of the human being in time, the depths of his psyche, his mortality and its coordinates in space.
My theme always is to scratch at this shiny but thin surfaces of the modern civilization.
Not innovation stands in the centre of my works ,but rather a recombination of existing ideas. Quotation-like refer from baroque up to the pop and street art often stands side by side as sampling and mixing from codes and as an enlarged art concept.
During the 80s I moved to Hamburg /Germany. Between 86 and 92 I run the underground gallery Abriss on the Hafenstrasse at St. Pauli, a living quarter of Bars , Prostiutes, anarchy and squatters.
In the middle of the 70s I started to study, first Design at the Folkwangschule in Essen and then Art at the Academy in Düsseldorf. Then a year of study in Amsterdam was added...
With a subtle minimalistic approach, Pittjes Hitschfeld creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art can be found. The work is aloof and systematic and mostly a cool and neutral imagery is used. The rejection of classical painting with its backgrounds, perspectives and landscapes gives the objects depicted an appearance of size and monumentality up to the sacred, the mostly empty, often rough backgrounds contrast sharply with the detail and smoothness of the depicted.
His imagery is extremely complex, every detail of his works is intentional.
It is a rejection of the primacy of reason and the principles of modernity, with its belief in progress, emphasised since the Enlightenment, and a turn to aspects of human affectivity and emotionality.
This makes him a clear representative of postmodernism.
Ludwig Seyfarth,Art publicist and curator, Secretary General of the German section of the international art critics association AICA.
