Alfried Hagedorn

Alfried Hagedorn, born in Bremen in 1940, is engaged in abstract painting with lyrical, gestural and constructive tendencies as well as sculptural projects.

He studied at the College of Art in Bremen and the Academies of Fine Arts in Vienna and Munich, with Jean Deyrolle and Raimer Jochims, graduated with a diploma and taught for one year as an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Afterwards he went for 2 ¾ years with a scholarship of the DAAD and the Japanese Government ( Mombushô ) to the Academy of Arts Kyoto ( Geijutsu Daigaku ) in Japan. Since 1975 he has been working as a freelance artist in Munich. From 1976 he taught for 8 years as a lecturer at the College of Art and Design in Aachen and one year at the Salzburg-College of the University of Illinois. Hagedorn became interested in foreign cultures at an early age, which over the course of time developed into a pronounced intercultural commitment. In 1980 he was awarded the „Water Lilies Prize“ of the City of Munich and in 2018 he received sponsorship from the Foundation of the German Federal President.

Since Hagedorn stopped working on the „Energy Fields“ in 1978, he has called his painting "Open Painting" *. Planning is pushed back in order to create space for the unconscious. This painting is ambiguous or insoluble, even enigmatic. That is why it does not offer the viewer any clear and rash interpretations and keeps his vision suspended. Thus the visual energy of the picture remains active for the viewer and he can stay attentively in presence. At the centre of Hagedorn's painting is light, colour and transparency. He masters strong contrasts and fine colour transitions, density and dissolution, as well as dealing with emptiness and abundance, closeness and distance, Earth and cosmos. Thus formations move in a positive and negative relationship to each other, like object and space in between. They are a supporting element of his painting. As well as the idea of permeability and non-seclusion of the picture. Because perfection is conclusion, end, death. Last but not least, the remaining parts of the white ground, at the edge of the picture and in the pictorial event, are allusions to the background noise of space. Pictorial space and space meet. Spans become visible. The open perception of images leads to visual cognition, as recognition and understanding of visual phenomena, their nature, structure and effect. The impulse thus received expands and transcends everyday vision.

Hagedorn's works are in private and public collections. Apart from Germany, he has had exhibitions in Japan, China, Thailand, Hong Kong, North America and Brazil. He works in Munich, Germany and Paraty, Brazil.

* See: Umberto Eco, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Byung Chul Han, François Cheng etc.