Wolfgang Tiemann

Migrating Media through 1250 Years

The Painter... The Sculptor... The Lithographer...

...celebrates 1250 Years of Papermaking in the West. "PapeRRoads" is the name of an art project which throws a bridge between Germany, where papermills did not occur before the late 14th century, and Samarkand, the first capital of papermaking outside of China in the middle of the 8th century.
The year 751, the date of the battle at Talas near Samarkand, is regarded as the beginning of papermaking in the islamic world. Actually, the legend of some prisoners of war, who disclosed the Chinese technology to Arab merchants after that date, conceals decades of technological dissemination between China and its neighbouring countries.

In his project "PapeRRoads", the German artist Wolfgang Tiemann from Hanover refers to the anniversary of this outstanding event. Twenty lithographies on paper have been etched in his studio near Hanover, assigned to follow the historical way of papermaking from China through Samarkand and the islamic world to Germany. The monumental size (4.80 to 1.27 meters) of these lithographies underlines the importance of paper in human civilization up to the present day.

As a painter, a sculptor and a lithographer, Wolfgang Tiemann reflects the modulations of body and landscape, of man in history. Exhibitions in Russia (1998) and America (2000), studies in Italy (1977/1992), in Greece (1975/78), in Spain (1991), in Tunisia (1993), and in Cuba (2000) shaped the artist's global view on human heritage during the last twenty years. "PapeRRoads" is designed to deal with the historical dimension of the artist's most intimate material, with paper as the heart of visual and literal communication. More than painting or sculpturing, lithography was at the origin of Tiemann's imagination. Representations of light and of landscape, faces and remnants of history - in Tiemann's work they all bore traces of their lithographic origin. Returning to paper means to rediscover the truth of lines and space, of colours and light.

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