untitled

charcoal on paper

Georg Thumbach's first path to any new work leads "into the wood," as they say in Bavaria for the forest. With Thumbach, this must be taken literally and figuratively. At the beginning there is the open-air drawing. With large rolls of paper, he marches into the forest solitude of monocultural spruce preserves. Coniferous trees without charm, seemingly sterile and lifeless. There, where no walker strays, Thumbach enters his studio: in the undergrowth he draws in rapid succession sections of these thickets, light and shadow in shimmering alternation, tangled branches, broken wood, fallen trunks, rotting stumps, scrawny branches, needle carpets.
Chaos captured on paper, planted by man, disarranged by nature, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the image of the forest cultivated since Romanticism. Charcoal on paper, an austere coolness despite the plant clutter. And yet one knows immediately how it must feel to be there oneself. The thicket has something magical rather than mystical about it: after all, that's what the German forest can look like. Far from the roaring deer in oak forests.
Although nothing about them is photorealistic or purely gestural, the images are compellingly coherent. Abstract and yet concrete. In them, time seems to be suspended, or at least a different measure of time prevails. Duration has a greater weight here, the growth and decay of the plant matter challenges the viewer's haste.
(Hannes Hintermeier, FAZ, 6.6.2017)