Jürgen Buhre loves people. And Jürgen Buhre loves colors. These are the keys to his work. Jürgen Buhre loves colors - well, he loves most colors. Blue he does not love - blue of all things, an epoch-defining color in art. But he loves red that he manages to bring lighting up in diverse shades like no other . He also loves orange, yellow, even light green, black and white. Black and white, in infinite nuances, even have an upward trend with him.
Jürgen Buhre love the colors so much that he applies them bold and vivid. To use the word "paste-like" would be an understatement. With the aid of pulp he rather creates whole mountains and rugged canyons of color. "You have to hang the picture so that the slanting evening sun is shining on it," he then gives the instruction, in order to produce the play of light and shadow that gives life to his paintings.
Jürgen Buhre loves people - well, he loves most people. Whoever is crooked to him, he does not love. But that's always because of the other. Jürgen Buhre himself is open, friendly, warmhearted, approaches everyone. Because he loves people, he paints people. More specifically, he paints the "Buhre-Beings". The Buhre-Beings are abstracted. Most of the time a few lines suffice, which give the head, body and limbs a most vivid expression. He does not trivialize people as a stick figures, but he develops them as expressive characters who sometimes do without arms, sometimes without legs, to express an attitude.
Undernourished they may be, the Buhre-Beings, but never cold. They are highly emotional - sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes proud, sometimes shy, from time to time strong and powerful, and sometimes reticent and weak. Many figures are provided with titles that give evidence of their condition, but often these are only functional terms (like "Ballerina") and it is up to the famous eye of the beholder which emotional state he interprets into the attitude and the colour world of the Buhre-Beings.
For many years, Jürgen Buhre has varied his Beings - in different colors, in varied environments, with changing attitudes. The artist had found his style - which did not mean that he did not develop. Jürgen Buhre loves people, loves colors, but also loves a good wine. So he has created his "Buhre Wine". In collaboration with an Ingelheim winery he has created a label for a wine, an Early Burgundy red wine. German red wine? Yes, Jürgen Buhre has discovered one of the few German red wines that are equal to their French counterparts from Burgundy. The Buhre wine tastes like a blend of fruit and mineral flavors, like red berries and flint.
The wine is the product of the art of the winemaker, the packaging is the product of the art of the painter. Jürgen Buhre has packed his wine in a wooden box, bottle for bottle. And the lid of this wooden crate is decorated with - how could it be otherwise - a Buhre-Being, sometimes in red, sometimes in orange, sometimes in white and red and in yellow, but always bright and lively. You can place the wooden box vertically like a sculpture, or you can hang up the lid as a painting, perhaps in an acrylic box or behind a glass panel, to create a frame for the wooden plate.
The wine crates were a further development, the wire and steel sculptures another. As the painted Buhre-Beings were already plastic, it made sense to consequently go into the third dimension. And what better offer for the three-dimensional figuration of the skrawny Buhre-Beings than wire? First Jürgen Buhre developed small, handy models made of wire.
Then we saw him, equipped with fireproof gloves, welding machine, hammer and tongs, in the great hall of the "Schwarzkaue" of the artists’ coalmine Unser Fritz, as he formed a giant sculpture of steel rod, supported by a trained metal worker.
The sculptural Buhre-Beings are alive like their two-dimensional brothers - they have the same flowing shapes that seem to move even though they are made of solid steel. Yet there are not just emotion and intuition in these forms. "I had to use a lot of maths", the artist confesses, "to make sure that the sculpture is stable".
The next evolution of the Buhre-Beings is represented by the portraits. Jürgen Buhre began to paint heads only - of course in his typical style, with strong, plastic colors, highly abstracted yet (or rather because of it) expressive.
The farthest step forward Jürgen Buhre has made when he was awarded the coveted scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. In November and December 2012 he was getting inspired by Paris. Full of enthusiasm, eyes flashing , scintillating, he reported immediately after his return about the stimulations that Paris had given him. Two experiences have particularly enriched his art: the "Vintage" culture of the Paris people - the celebration of the old, used - and the famous Paris Opera.
Both inspired Jürgen Buhre to work on new subjects with new materials. He began to portray the dancers who had fascinated him so much in the opera, on the one hand more representational, natural, with full distinct bodies than the malnourished Buhre-Beings made from thin lines had been. On the other hand, the artist had taken the materiality and the fabrics from the opera and from flea markets and developed his dancers with paint-soaked rags, old rags that he had accumulated in his studio for years and that he had brought to Paris to lend these figures materiality, plasticity and life. Rarely an artist has gained so much inspiration from his fellowship at the Cité Internationale des Arts as Jürgen Buhre.
And the innovation cycle is far from over. More ideas and projects follow, for example, the painting series "The Royal Game" that shows the black and white chess pieces as well as players and strategies.
No doubt about it: as homo sapiens emerged from an evolution, so there is also the evolution of the Buhre-Beings. We are anxious to see what developments are still waiting for us.
Volker Eichener