Short Stories About the Sparks in the OUBEY MINDSPACE – Episode 2: The Horsehead Nebula

About 1,500 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Orion, there is a dark nebula. A dark field that cannot compete with the breathtaking beauty of the “Three Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula. Nevertheless, its silhouette is no less fascinating. It is named after it: “Horsehead Nebula”  

In these cosmic nebula formations, of which there are countless in our universe, the exploded “dust” of dead stars collects and becomes the birthplace of new stars. Some call it cosmic recycling, others call it the nursery of the stars.

While we can only see the Eagle Nebula, 7,000 light-years away, through the eye of space telescopes, the Horsehead Nebula, due to its relative proximity to Earth, can be discovered and marveled at from here with a sufficiently powerful telescope.

In 1987, OUBEY dedicated a painting to the Horsehead Nebula which never ceases to amaze when viewed up close. Only then can you see the wafer-thin veins in the graphite-gray crackle of the dust clouds, revealing the dull shimmer of gold in the cosmic background. Above and through everything float bright red cloud formations that surround the core of the image.

The painting was created without a single brushstroke or any other manual intervention by the artist. As always, the coated hardboard panel lay horizontally on the floor during the creative process. This not only eliminated the artist’s signature, but also reduced the external influence of Earth’s gravity to a minimum. “It is important to me that my paintings are free of the artist’s signature,” said OUBEY himself. For this reason, he never signed any of the paintings from this creative period. All of his ‘painterly’ works from the 1980s were consistently created according to this principle. In “Horsehead Nebula,” he achieved a precision and depth of detail unlike any other painting.

OUBEY was not concerned with creating a replica. Photographs taken by space telescopes serve that purpose. Rather, he sought to find an artistic expression for his inner image, his vision of the Horsehead Nebula, and thus to honor this wonderful cosmic place in his own way. After all, the dust of dead stars in space not only constantly gives rise to new stars. All life on this earth, including our own species, owes its existence to this very special substance.

“This is truly cosmic art,” someone said when they saw this image. It is an expression of OUBEY’s deep connection to the cosmos, which he developed at a very young age. However, it would never have occurred to him to describe his work as “cosmic art.” Art is art. The cosmos is the cosmos.

Thus, both can be found in a Spark from the OUBEY MINDSPACE: the cosmos in the form of the Horsehead Nebula and art in the form of OUBEY’s painting of the same name.

In the early years of the MINDKISS project, when I spoke to people who knew the art world much better than I did, I found that there was a widespread belief that art had to be classifiable. Some people, quite kindly, said that a name was needed that would briefly sum up the approach or orientation of OUBEY’s work.

From a marketing perspective, this may seem plausible. However, the incredible diversity of OUBEY’s work makes such categorization impossible. This is not a problem for the MINDKISS project. On the contrary, its approach itself represents a diversity for which there is no label.

One person who immediately recognized this when encountering an original OUBEY painting and expressed it both analytically and emotionally was Prof. Peter Kruse. The video impressively shows how he approached the painting, which was completely unknown to him until then.

It was not until many years after the creation of the “Horsehead Nebula” that OUBEY returned to the theme of stars with his StarPixels. He announced in March 2004 that he would paint a thousand stars. That year, I finally gave him a telescope for Christmas. One with which he could see the Horsehead Nebula with his own eyes from the Black Forest.