Otto Zitmanis

The painting of Otto Zitmanis is saturated with movement and emotional tension — it is rooted in the expressionist tradition, where the figure becomes a fragile and at the same time dramatic bearer of a person's inner world. In the paintings a tension of relationship opens between one or several figures, in whom intense experience, unspoken fear, longing, love, aggression and sorrow are concentrated.

The grotesque language in the artist's work is not an end in itself — it becomes an instrument with which it is possible to speak about subjective experience and the fragility of psychological contradiction. The deformation of forms, the broken composition and the strained space echo precisely the emotional state depicted, where the visual solution is closely interwoven with the message.

Colour in Otto Zitmanis's work is a bearer of energy. Collisions of opposing colours — blue and red, and the presence of pure yellow, violet, electric green and pink — make a lively, pulsing field of colour. The strong black contours heighten the intensity of colour still further, bringing out the dramatic presence of the figures in space. The artist models volumes with layers of colour in virtuoso fashion, giving the bodies density and physical tension.