Henry Tietzsch-Tyler

a life unlived

 

a life unlived  is an open-ended work combining practices in painting, sculpture, performance and installation. It has its roots in the particular intergenerational- or post- memory experience that is typical of a generation whose parents suffered personal and collective trauma in conflict zones around the world. For this work I draw on my own attempts to make sense of the stories my mother told of her life in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. Postmemory is a powerful and sometimes consuming reality for many descendants of a generation who survived war, loss and exile. I present it in the form of an archive of the artist’s work in which the artist intervenes informally as activator, guide and interlocutor.

The work’s title, a life unlived, refers both to the previous life of the parent, experienced by the child only indirectly through the parent’s stories and behaviour, and to the child’s own later life, dominated by their inheritance from the past. In this work I often allude to an in-between-space, a kind of interminable and inescapable threshold zone, which begins for me in 1945,  a decade before I was born, the child of a German economic migrant who left the material and moral ruins of her homeland for a new life. Whilst my own life has been dominated by my mother’s experiences and by her wartime and post-war narrative, its dramas and obfuscations, my personal vision and sense of responsibility has developed through experimental practices in art, and in exploring  notions of Grenzsituationen  or border situations (Jaspers). Art is for me a site for embodying the coexistence of absence and presence and the fluidity of time. It is an allowing space.

The paintings that form the central part of the work have been created in my studios in Sheffield and Berlin over the past three decades. There are now more than two hundred works on canvas and over seven hundred works on paper, as well as found objects and documentary photographic material. Extracts from the project have been exhibited in cities across Europe, including Prague, Berlin, London, Liverpool, Sheffield, Kaunas and Hamburg.

a life unlived  takes the form of an installation in flux, activated through the interventions of the artist. Central to the installation is a space for conversation.     

Postscript

A dark colouring has dominated the canvases since 2014, emerging through a succession of overpaintings (Übermalungen) in greys and blacks on a wet ground of bright colour. Seen from a distance the paintings can appear uniformly blank, like darkened door or window spaces, but on approaching them they begin to reveal their complexites.

 

 Henry Tietzsch-Tyler

February 2022

https://www.axisweb.org/p/henrytietzsch-tyler/