Astrid Albers on her abstract painting and creative chaos.
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Astrid Albers is a freelance painter who was born in Holstein in northern Germany in 1955. She studied free painting in Kiel in her early 20s right before moving to Berlin in 1976. Albers is a fan of Tuscany where she finds most of her inspiration. From the late 1990s, she stayed in Italy with the artist Jürgen Sage and since then paintings were created on which the couple worked together from start to finish. However, after his death in 2012, she has been working alone.
In Albers dense, structured artworks, colours flow and highly abstract images stand out of the chaos created by the first application of paint. Through Alber’s artistic process, it is often the strong brushstrokes as well as the distribution of the paint that manage to give structure and reflect the portrayed landscapes.
Albers uses an affluent amount of paint and, through this technique, she builds a close relationship between the fields, landscapes, sky and natural elements of the painting to the more abstract and numinous facets such as the spirits, the northern lights and the water of dreams.
Astrid Albers works on thematic series that follow identical formats. However, the artist chooses to individualize each painting with the same theme by giving each one of them a variant or something distinctive. Hence, she moves forward in the chosen topic and recreates it several times. The forms seem to flow, the earth moves and water always plays a major role. Water is almost always in the landscape-based images as the artist believes all life, movement, growth and future spring from it. Astrid Albers says herself: "Nothing works without blue", in fact her pictures are improbable and unconceivable without the colour blue.
Astrid Albers' pictures seem to know no outer limits. A river, the landscape, rows of houses or people can also be imagined beyond the edges of the picture, as if everything could expand further and thus give an idea of an infinite world. In this way their "ambassadors", and the "world spirits", give a feeling of unity and togetherness.
As a teacher, Astrid Albers likes to share her knowledge with her students. In the vastness of the Italian landscape of the region “Marche”, where she currently lives, is a different perception of the environment compared to the narrowness and liveliness of a big city like Berlin. It is precisely these opposites that prompt Astrid Albers to give new expression to her cosmopolitan thinking.