"His
world radiates a warm completeness in which the erotic plays as great
a part as passion and death. Fiedler was searching for life and reality,
and his style, his own Baroque Expressionism, was inextricably linked
with it. Through his works he will survive amongst us as a man who is
a unified whole: an exceptionally unscathed, pure and independent artist."
"Today
there is no painter apart from Herbert Fiedler who possesses so strong
a sense of reality that it could give rise to so powerful a realism.
Most of those who paint from nature nowadays are unwillingly confirming
the right of abstract art to exist. The things that ought to indicate
life in their works attest of its absence. In Fiedler's works, in contrast,
reality is echoed in a large and unbroken vitality. It enables the painting
to convey an emotion which one feels inclined to hold in unreservedly
high esteem." "Whether
one looks at his interesting Eve triptych with the symbolism
of the eternally feminine, his emotional still life with the horrific
Aztec head, or his dramatic Descent from the Cross (distantly reminiscent
of Grünewald), his ballet girl or the woman trying her hat on in
front of the mirror his power and conscious struggle with the
problem is always palpable. It is as if one were listening to music
by Hindemith: a struggle with the spirit and the material, and at the
same time a profoundly i nternalized and by no means superficial beauty." "An
extensive collective show of Herbert Fiedler's works enables us to recognise
the personality of a painter who is interested less in colourist refinement
than in a fundamental penetration of painting by things that are elementally
and humanly valid, such as in the Woman in a Field which
is strongly reminiscent of the great Millet's pastoral scenes. The artist
is just as expressive in a new artistic form and technique. He paints
with the natural colours of ground stones onto cement slabs, thus creating
a weatherproof work of art [...]. The exhibited Entombment
from a Golgotha picture is an excellent, convincing test of this technical
invention." |