By Claudia von Duehren
The acrylic paintings and sculptures of “Endzeitliebe” were created in the very living studio on Potsdamer Platz where his famous father Karl Horst Hödicke was creative and where he played as a child.
As a toddler, he crawled around here between his father’s paint buckets. Now his own children are making the 220 square meter living studio on Potsdamer Platz unsafe.
Because Jonas Hödicke (39) has long since followed in his famous father’s footsteps. The son of painter prince and art professor Karl Horst Hödicke (85) is now showing a selection of his paintings and sculptures on Kurfürstendamm.
Under the title “Endzeitliebe” over 30 large-format acrylic paintings and sculptures (2000-6000 euros) will be exhibited. Jonas Hödicke refers the title to the turning point since the Ukraine War. “We had 60 years of peace, the future looks less rosy,” the artist is convinced.
Jonas as little Stepke with dad Karl Horst Hödicke Photo: private
But he also associates the term “end-time love” with something morbidly beautiful. Just as he has always been fascinated by ruins and captures them on canvas. The fact that Jonas Hödicke ultimately ended up in painting – his father’s profession – has a long history.
Do something with art
“As a teenager, I didn’t know at all what I wanted to be. I couldn’t accept authority,” he remembers. After changing schools several times, his parents took him to an English boarding school, which he “hated from the first moment,” but ultimately left with a secondary school diploma. Today, Jonas Hödicke understands the worries: “I hope my children don’t have to worry.”
When it came to his future after a failed attempt as a construction worker in Ireland, the father said to his son: “Boy, I don’t have a pizzeria where you can waitress, why don’t you do something with art?” Both created in their holiday home on the Irish west coast an application folder for the art school in Berlin.
But Jonas didn’t give it up: “I knew that Berlin and my friends would distract me too much. Luckily, I met Markus Lüpertz, an old friend of my father’s, at Ciao Ciao and he offered me the opportunity to study sculpture with him as a guest student in Düsseldorf.”
Jonas Hödicke summarizes his art under the term “figurative painting and sculpture”. The motives can be dark Photo: Axel Bahr
Things didn’t always go smoothly with the professors at the University of Düsseldorf, but he found his own style. He had actually already found it on a construction site in Ireland: Hödicke forms sculptures out of wire, which he sets in concrete and peels out of the stone again.
Initially he had the figures cast in bronze, but because of the price they were only 50 centimeters tall. “Actually, they were supposed to be really huge and that’s why I painted the sculptures on two by three meter canvases.”
But painting also has another advantage: it is quiet. Hödicke took over his father’s old studio in a factory loft on Potsdamer Platz over ten years ago. “These are all expensive apartments here now and it doesn’t go down so well when I work on stone or wood loudly,” he is sure.
He doesn’t think it’s ideal that his little children are now scurrying around the paint buckets, but that’s how things come full circle.
Until November 3rd, Kurfürstendamm 142, Mon-Fri 12 p.m. – 6 p.m., Sat 2 p.m. – 6 p.m