Short Stories About the Sparks in the OUBEY MINDSPACE – Episode 5: The Studio

Art comes into being first and foremost within the inner space of the artist — in their brain, their mind, their soul. That is where the sources of creative power lie.

It takes material form and shape in an external space — that is where it comes into the world.

This space can be a studio. For OUBEY, however, during the early years of his creative work, it was always the apartment in which he happened to be living. When we moved into our first shared home, a beautiful old apartment, the largest and brightest room became his first true studio.

Even before that, in his tiny apartment on Brunnenstraße, he had created magnificent paintings in very limited space — such as The Journey of the Monads, Green Painting, and Morphogenesis. It was there that he showed them to me for the first time. I was deeply impressed.

An explosion of creative energy occurred in his first real studio, in our apartment on Roonstraße. It was as though countless paintings had already been waiting inside him to finally see the light of day: Einstein’s Tears, Zero Field, Samurai, the triptych 27 Cube Memory System, and many more were created there between 1984 and 1987.

The move to his first studio outside our home gave his creativity yet another boost. Markus Lüpertz and Uwe Lindau had worked there before him. The landlady, an older, widowed, and very determined lady, liked to tell stories about her experiences with OUBEY’s “predecessors.” Lüpertz, she said, once wanted to give her one of his paintings — but it hadn’t looked like art to her, more like the suits in the window display of Karlsruhe’s largest men’s clothing store. So she had refused it.

In this studio on Sofienstraße, OUBEY began working with the Amiga 500 computer. That’s why an original photo of this studio — showing the “digital studio” — appears in the Spark section of the OUBEY MINDSPACE, which explores art and computer technology. There you’ll also find a quote by OUBEY on the relationship between art and computers — a statement whose fundamental insight reaches far beyond its time and remains just as valid and significant in 2025 as it was then.

With the PhotonPaintings he created on the Amiga 500, he held his first and only, very successful exhibition in 1992, titled MINDKISS – The PHOTONPAINTING. I later named the MINDKISS project after this exhibition in 2005. In case you wonder why the catalogue cover names a Wendelin Koehler as presenting artist, you will find the answer at the same Spark as mentioned above.

In this studio, OUBEY also painted with oil on canvas for the first time. However, he found that this technique was unsuitable for realizing the images that already existed in his mind, as he put it. Even computer work reached its limits of materialization — enlarging the image files to formats of adequate size was enormously complex and unaffordable.

OUBEY dreamed of one day printing them with a plotter on enormous canvases, or projecting them onto large white walls or waterfalls using laser technology—early ideas for an immersive 360° presentation of his art. This is just one example of how far ahead of his time he was in his imagination. But at that time, for an artist with limited financial means, that dream was still far out of reach. Today, when we publicly present his great late work GENESIS as an immersive 360° room projection, we are following in the footsteps of his thoughts.

Then he was given notice to vacate the studio. It was a hard blow. He knew how difficult it would be to find another suitable — or even halfway decent — space. As I had done in 1987, I searched tirelessly for a new studio for him. And once again, after months of searching, I was lucky enough to find a good one — larger, brighter, closer to our home, and affordable. When I told OUBEY about it, he had serious doubts. But the moment he entered it for the first time, it was immediately clear that this was his space. What a stroke of luck!

Take your time for the experience of a virtual 360° visit at OUBEYs studio.

It took quite a while before he had set up this new studio in a way that made him feel comfortable — something that was an absolute prerequisite for his painting. There was a couch, a large satellite TV, a small open kitchen, a bathroom, a big bed, and a lemon tree I had given him as a housewarming gift.

Then, in 2003, came the next explosion of creativity: large-format paintings, oil on coated fiberboard — GENESIS and StarPixelClusters. I had never before seen OUBEY so consistently and continuously productive. He was completely at one with himself. And for the first time after twelve years of withdrawal, he was ready for another exhibition.

I still remember vividly how, after his fatal accident, I entered the studio alone for the first time in August 2004 — with the greatest respect, knowing that I would never have entered it without OUBEYs presence while he was alive. Because that was his space — his most personal realm of freedom. Yet the lemon tree needed water. Every three or four days.

And so, in time, OUBEYs studio became our space.

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There are six rooms in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn contain various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse is a story that tells us more about who OUBEY was and what he was like. I will tell these stories here.

Many thanks to the great team at Kubikfoto for their fantastic co-creation and their outstanding performance by the audiovisual production of the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Together we are delighted that the achievement of the OUBEY MINDSPACE has been awarded with three international awards, including the prestigous Red Dot Design Award 2025.