Galerie Fenna Wehlau - Ingo FRÖHLICH

Ingo Fröhlich

The draftsman Ingo Fröhlich

When I first entered Ingo Fröhlich's studio at 111 Torstrasse in Berlin on a chilly winter day, a fire was flickering in the stove, the teapot was on it. Ingo Fröhlich poured and added log after log. His large-format drawings hung from the walls in a specially invented hanging system. Again and again they were re-hung to present new diptychs and triptychs of drawings. Stroke after stroke worked out of the rhythm of movement - as in his spatial drawings. In them a cosmos of almost infinite possibilities of drawing opens up, of an infinite vocabulary in noting down the experienced world. The studio is for him a space of explorations of lines and forms, of drawings and installations, orders and arrangements, of paths and detours. Here breathes the joy and pleasure of experimentation and variation. The walls are filled with sketches and notations. The studio is an indispensable place of knowledge. ... Ingo Fröhlich conjugates his pictorial ideas with conceptual continuity through, in series and pairings, the difference of the same, varying the themes again and again. ....

Ingo Fröhlich uses the means and possibilities of drawing to analyze nature and landscape, their movement and change. Drawing as a complex process is preceded by decades of searching and recognition before the ideas about the movement of the hand on paper take shape. ... In his drawings he follows the interplay of nature, its appearances and forms, its phenomena and laws, its infinite variety of manifestations. It is a seismographic scanning of structure and hatching and the translation and abstraction to the line.

Ingo Fröhlich's works are dedicated to systematic-conceptual explorations of drawing beyond the limits of the paper. Time and space also play an important role. ...  In the process of drawing, insights into the perception and transformation of the world arise from a profound subtle scanning, which find their form in the line. "Drawings are concentrates of time and space, future and past, psychic, spiritual to metaphysical experience and thought." (Lucie Beppler)

Lines transform the surface. They play with space, depth and illusion. ... It is a seismographic scanning of structure and hatching and the translation and abstraction to line.

The spectrum of his drawings ranges from strictly conceptual compositions on paper and in space to light-handed loose landscape sketches made on car trips across Europe or in quiet seclusion during studio vagabond. ...

Ingo Fröhlich conjugates his pictorial ideas with conceptual continuity through, in series and pairings, the difference of the same, varying the themes again and again.

Excerpt from the catalog text of Frizzi Krella, Color and Line in the Infinite, in: Je dessine le temps, tu peins l'instant/Atelier vagabond, Ulrike Seyboth & Ingo Fröhlich, Berlin 2021, pp.49-51.