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Upcoming Artists

Detlef Gotzens
Lucian Gurau
Shawn Skeir
Gabriele Musenbrink

Work on Paper by Detlef Gotzens, private collection Montreal.

Detlef Gotzens (Dego)

Artlife-Galleries is delighted to introduce International Artists to the greater Tampa Bay Region one by one as we will add them to the group of Artists that we wish to represent and support.

To build up their profiles and exposure is a work of passion and it takes commitment to their art that we feel strongly about. There are already a handful of artists that we selected to be introduced.

Our main focus now is on the Artist Detlef (Dego) Gotzens, currently living and working in Quebec, Canada, he was born and raised in Cologne Germany before he came to Canada in 1985. Detlef is an artist who is influenced by the area of the 1980s that spurred the group of the “Junge Wilde’ the “young wild” and that was mainly responsible for the rejuvenation and new focus on painting again when it was declared to be dead, as at various times before.

These young artists were all mingling and congregating in Cologne’s well known Pub and Bistro scene of the time and Detlef’s was part of that scene. Artists like Martin Kippenberger, Walter Dahn, Albert Oehlen, Sigmar Polke, and many more became some of today’s top artists and internationally known. They moved in and out of the city between Cologne and Duesseldorf many of them studying in Duesseldorf at the Academy under Joseph Beuys.

Detlef’s oeuvre is mainly concerned with painting and sculpture but his initial training was in the stained glass field, where he completed his training all the way up to a Masters’s degree at the Guild of Cologne. He always pursuit painting at the same time he was working in the field of conservation and restoration of historic stained glass in his native Cologne.

Detlef’s vocabulary is vast and he doesn’t like to be labeled as either an abstract or figurative artist although he uses all of it in his work, he takes a similar stand and attitude as Gerhard Richter does when he was asked why he is pursuing especially painting this way, abstract as well as figurative.

Detlefs work is always intellectually infused and he also doesn’t shy away from difficult social-political issues because he believes that as far as his work is concerned he is reflecting on our time based on his own emotional and intellectual absorption of the world. He says artists are a mirror of their time and should always be seen within the context of it.

His Sculptural work is borne out of his background in glass and involves glass on its own or in combination with other materials, whereby he is interested in the contrast as well as the harmony of these materials with glass.

Occasionally Detlef still does Architectural Art Glass projects and installations as long as they allow him to fulfill his vision within the space and for the material, we will show some examples of his work that is interesting for Designers and Architects to consider.

November 2018, Huntingdon Quebec Exhibition, “The Massacre of the innocents”, selected works accompanied Detlef’s reinterpretation of the Rubens Painting. Please note that all the stained glass windows in the Exhibition hall are also Detlef’s creations that he did in 2004 as a Public Art project.