He is a seeker, an adventurer, a discoverer, a gambler and poet. Hans-Jürgen Wormeck sparkles with ideas. His home (studio), an enlarged barn, became a sole place of creative power. 

He says “My art is a mystery no matter how much we try to reveal it, it’s ever-lasting. There is a quality of animation, contemplation and a not ending way.” (1)

Born 1941 in West-Prussia (nowadays Poland) Wormeck already started painting as a pupil. His passion resulted in studying art in Mainz and Berlin. After an assistant place in Dortmund he decided to look for a home where he could enjoy life to the full: the Teufelsmoor. He portrays the nature of this region in his own poetic way. 

“Landscape in winter, in the Hammewiesen at the fringe of the Teufelsmoor,  wild geese, swans are standing upright in ice-pools, chattering through the water, pausing, scrutinizing the environment and more - and always a pace nearer – just as I dreamt in my childhood.” (2)

At the beginning of his artistic work the etching dominated. Ever since this special sensible form of art has been one of his most impressive languages. Hans-Jürgen Wormeck makes himself inspire the landscape of the Teufelsmoor with all its secrets. The theme here is varying between subtle motives up to alienations, for example by creating ambivalences, ironies and abstractions. In his work he never adopts the adoring, sentimental look of the Old Worpsweders’. 

At the end of the eighties his work showed other dimensions. Wormeck made experiments on large sized canvasses with colours and designs, glued silk-papers and tissues in the paintings and covered them again. These works are not meant with regard to the contents. He, the seeker who also loves playing with materials uses the colours for their sakes. According to the informal and abstract expressionism he lays them on with gesture, passionately and emotionally, etching and cutting marks in the canvasses, covering them with transparent substances which temporarily melt into another. Among others the “Blauberg” arose by these means.

The various installations of Hans-Jürgen Wormeck entitled “Der Pannonische Hochstand” (Pannonic high lookout post) reflect his poetic fantasies, constantly being deepened by a long lasting project by which the artist experiences all metamorphoses of his creative urge. 

“Having simultaneous and transverse thoughts at a giddy height, associating and coming across unknown perspectives and contexts as well as establishing new proximities of materials and colours - in a word: all things considered being suitable to meet poetic relations - that is PANNONISCH”. (3)

The Pannonic elements (pannonische Elemente) of Hans-Jürgen Wormeck are yew-wood, the colour indigo, gold, parachute silk and tissue paper. From these materials the artist makes strange things like huge Lollis from tissue paper or small jewel-cases filled with concrete in which a “Hochstand”(high lookout post) has been etched or Lollis are inlayed.. This principle of three steps by which from two things always a third one results is stretching through all works of this series and is typical PANNONISCH” (3).

“Do you sometimes have the feeling that you are crazy?” Hans-Jürgen Wormeck has been asked by a reviewer with regard to his PANNONISCHE WELT (Pannonic world). “Certainly, I am simply crazy” the artist answered. “It would be quite terrible for me being forced to waste any time in the madness of normalcy” (4). 

Just out of this position which simultaneously allows a way of acting free of purposes things can emerge which raise questions, surprise, bewitch and contain mysteries.

“Everybody who feels something in view of my art is on my trail” Hans-Jürgen Wormeck says. “Art isn’t tied to place and time, not to moral and convention. It derives from one place and looks for another which centres in ourselves.”(5)

Source: Donata Holz “Under the large heavens”.