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This sensitive portrait by Hubertus Giebe dates from 1979. We have no record of who the man is, though we can clearly see he is elderly. Yet despite his furrowed forehead and slanting shoulders, he seems less frail than contemplative, lost in thought. With the scene largely rendered in a subdued palette, the highlights in red stand out. This red is a special colour tone, one which regularly appears in Giebe’s later works.

When he painted this work, Hubertus Giebe was 26 years old. At that time, he had left the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden prematurely. In his view, the material he was taught there was ‘too thin’. He wanted to follow his own path in art. He moved to Leipzig and – as curator Astrid Nielsen explains – found a teacher there he trusted:

“Hubertus Giebe became a student of Bernhard Heisig – a mentor certainly evident in part in Giebe’s works. Of course, this doesn’t mean he imitates Heisig, or is directly influenced by him. Instead, Giebe found in Heisig’s formal vocabulary, as it were, an inherent correspondence with his own themes.”

During the years of the GDR, Giebe refused to conform with state approved art. For a time, the Stasi kept him under surveillance. Nonetheless, Giebe, a very well-read artist, gradually gained a reputation in the 1980s, in particular for expressive, allegorical paintings critically engaging with history and literature. Apart from this ‘colourful theatre of the world’, he also painted such meditative portraits as this one. The heart of his oeuvre is the human being, a major topic to which he has always remained true. When asked ‘why?’ in an interview in 2013, Hubertus Giebe replied:

“Is there anything more interesting than the human being, this incredible phenomenon which has appeared on this Earth, moves in symbols, tries to discover where it comes from and where it is going? I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else. Each person is unique, with a particular aura and radiance … For me, that is a constant challenge and fascination.”