The paintings of Hermann Falke embody, throughout all of his creative periods, a consistently humanistic interpretation of the existentialist conditions of life. The visualised poetics of this sensitive spiritual cosmopolite and wandering itinerant – threading through the catacombs of human consciousness and subconsciousness, an erudite sophisticate resolutely immersed in the archetypical timelessness of the imagined ideal of ancient Arcadia and a bitter critic of the contemporary way of life – is invariably elevated to the language of metaphor, with an all-encompassing wish to expose the key to the ultimate truths of earthly human vanity. His extensive oeuvre, kept by the exemplary foundation located in the painter’s final home in the town of Loibach under the Petzen mountain and lying just within shooting range of the Slovenian border, reflects Falke’s dualistic concept of the magical riddle about the preciousness of life and the pain of the world.

Text: Marko Košan