Dieter Hastenteufel

October 2001

Dieter Hastenteufel works with the landscape and cultural artifacts indigenous to the place and time where he finds himself. In large painted canvases from his time in Mexico he explored the vibrant, expressive forms and colours found in carnival masks. In a series of lino-block prints, created during a summer teaching stint in Muskoka, he portrays objects and icons peculiar to that place, each acting as catalyst into a world of gesture and symbol. Another series of two-dimensional work featured in this exhibition explores the rural landscape around Flesherton from the perspective of a hunter's rifle sight. This, by his own admission, is without commentary on hunting practices. The paintings, rich in ironic images, descry the complexities of the subconscious.

The exhibition also includes one sculpture: Abeona/Adeona, a rudely formed twig boat, seven feet long, that contains the illuminated neon words 'refuse to die'. One allusion is the boat as vessel between the temporal and spiritual worlds as 'The Boat of Sharon' traverses the river Styx to the land of eternal shade. 'For more than two decades, pyramids, boats and wheels have populated my sculptures and paintings,' says Dieter Hastenteufel. 'In my vanguard search to create an enduring work of art, I have come back to them time and time again, these steadfast symbols of timelessness.'

Dieter Hastenteufel, an internationally acclaimed sculptor and painter, was born in Basel, Switzerland. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Art in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1968, where he studied Sculpture and Ceramic-Mural. Dieter moved to Canada in 1969 and lives in Flesherton, Ontario.