“I failed in my efforts and attempts to understand the world as a whole, but now grow daily to experience it in small ways, making it more perceptible right away.”

With his targeted, naïve view of the apparent banalities of everyday life, the artist Tim Lorenz makes the unseen or overlooked visible by trying to recall his childlike perception.

Lorenz has largely turned away from his earlier artistic work, narrative pictures and figurative drawing and painting. He finds his inspiration in contemplative observation, a skill we all practise to perfection in childhood, but which we unlearn as we grow older and gain experience.

In his colourful paintings, sometimes countless layers of colour surfaces are piled up, contoured by lines: “The material piles up on my canvases, just as chaotically as the sensory impressions from my observations. With the intervention of lines I break up this apparent chaos and give the picture a form.”

The contours serve Lorenz as his alphabet, his language with which he communicates the abstraction of his observations. Each painting thus tells a different short story of his snapshots.

The optical depth of his painting, as well as the many small and remarkable details, draw the viewer into the pictures. With each step towards the canvas, more and more small pictorial universes open up within a pictorial cosmos. The artist is less concerned that these universes be understood than that they be discovered and felt.

Today, Lorenz’s ‘little observations’ have gone out into the world and are represented in private and corporate collections worldwide.

Tim Lorenz was born in Varel in 1984. He studied Economics and later Art and Media, as well as Material Culture at the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. Lorenz currently lives and works in Oldenburg.