Stillleben mit zwei Köpfen 1914

Heinrich Campendonk, painted this ‘Still Life With Two Heads’ with oils on canvas, and it's a quirky feast for the eyes, isn’t it? The faces, rendered in prismatic hues, share the space with boldly outlined objects, and you can almost feel Campendonk puzzling over how to make it all fit. I imagine him, brush in hand, caught up in the sheer delight of color and form. He seems to want to see how far he can push the tension between representation and abstraction! There’s a dialogue happening here; the push and pull between the human and the inanimate, the real and the imagined. It reminds me of my own studio practice, where paintings morph through layers of trial and error, accident and intention. The juicy application of paint gives real weight to the work, while the off-kilter perspectives keep things lively. Campendonk is in conversation with other painters across time, all of us wrestling with what it means to translate the world onto a flat surface. He’s encouraging us to embrace ambiguity, reminding us that painting is, after all, an act of embodied expression.