Leipzig-based visual artist Raffael Bader graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig, Germany, in 2019. In 2020 he began exhibiting internationally, including Switzerland, the USA, the Netherlands and very recently in Japan at the Contemporary Art Foundation in Tokyo. In the Netherlands, Raffael is represented by Enari Gallery, Amsterdam.
When Raffael paints landscapes, imagination and representative depiction blend to create something new that stimulates the imagination. He once told me that very often he basically creates a painting would like to look at himself in this very moment. During his travels, Raffael fills numerous notebooks with drawings of landscapes and their elements such as plants and other details. For his landscape paintings (of various dimensions) he uses oil paint and oil crayons resulting into richly textured compositions with sometimes delicately thin layering or at other times urgent brushstrokes of a color palette which is not afraid of tender pastel hues and stark contrasts. His compositions represent a poetic idea of shifts between recognition, spatial or imaginary openness, dreamlike con-figruations and contradicting formations. The paintings appear almost as a longing desire towards the landscapes which Raffael depicts, to engage and move within what’s presenting itself before the eye.
When Raffael paints landscapes, imagination and representative depiction blend to create something new that stimulates the imagination. He once told me that very often he basically creates a painting would like to look at himself in this very moment. During his travels, Raffael fills numerous notebooks with drawings of landscapes and their elements such as plants and other details. For his landscape paintings (of various dimensions) he uses oil paint and oil crayons resulting into richly textured compositions with sometimes delicately thin layering or at other times urgent brushstrokes of a color palette which is not afraid of tender pastel hues and stark contrasts. His compositions represent a poetic idea of shifts between recognition, spatial or imaginary openness, dreamlike con-figruations and contradicting formations. The paintings appear almost as a longing desire towards the landscapes which Raffael depicts, to engage and move within what’s presenting itself before the eye.