PEBE Paul Bader, born and raised in the German Southwest, is an artist whose paintings and illustrations have developed an unmistakable identity. The foundation for PEBE’s creations involves an in-depth view of his surroundings and an extensive dialogue with his fellow man. Man, in solitude or company, both indoors and outdoors, remains his infinite subject. The interior and exterior of the contemporary human world is his primary objective. Certain aesthetic experiences, chosen by the artist, figuratively mirror the spirit of the age.

“My art is the preoccupation with the contemporary of the current world in expressive, often surreal Realism.”
I see in my artwork a synthesis of “real” and “abstract,” “existing” and “created”, a “procedure,” a vision that defines our time.”

Thus, Bader has created a monument to man: the human as he stands and walks, enacts a pose or, in an unguarded moment, relaxes, broods heavily, or floats on ice skates, as he dreams to himself or dances to jazz music. In doing so, PEBE has pushed the boundaries of an enormous range of artistic possibilities.

As diverse as his methods are, all of his art has one thing in common: not a single work gets trapped in unimaginative Realism or photographically reductive Naturalism; there is always something magically unbounded, a spirit freed from the shackles of imitation.

By reflecting on the strength of what’s linear, by reconfiguring in the sense of elementary simplification, he also integrates characteristics of the naïve.

PEBE preserves both the physical and physiognomic variables, and nevertheless, comes to determinations that define him as an individual artist. The artist does not necessarily portray individual people, but uses archetypes that appear in his artwork in a symbolic manner. There is the figure depicted from behind, from in front; there is one who walks, and one who strides.

The secret poetry is palpable. Dreams and hopes have seeped into PEBE’s palette of colors, embodying the vibrancy of the artwork, which neither descends into the bleak nor reaches into the ominous.

The figures - the painter speaks of “Diktatfiguren” - are assuredly from idiosyncratic abstraction, which can be understood as typical in the sense of his artistic trademark.

The experiences of cubism, surrealism, and the new objectivity flow into his œuvre, as do those of “écriture automatique” and postmodernism. (PEBE sees himself connected to the great Real). Furthermore, it is a realism that playfully and confidently appropriates the means of expression of Surrealism and above all, Expressionism.

“Painting goes beyond the painter. I conceive it as a service for the generation. It is able to decipher, to interpret life, existence, time.
One can do a lot with painting and drawing: criticize people, society, God and the world, accuse, protest, provoke. For me personally, I want to sift through and unearth the mundane, the seemingly banal, the obvious, behind which the “wonders” lie, free from the entrapment through stress, habit, indifference and search for sensations and qualities of life once believed lost.

I am on the trail for open spaces and experiences that are considered lost in this world, shrouded by smog, hustle and bustle, obscurity…an art form, where poetry, fascination, and magic still exist, yes optimism, a lust for life.”

PeBe's Philosophy