K. H. Hödicke came to Berlin in 1957 and studied painting under Fred Thieler. For the Nuremberg native, born in 1938, big city motifs would become his most important theme over the years. With mostly large-format works in strong colors and unconventional perspectives, he would become a chronicler of modern city life. His motifs are manifold and range from depictions of the sky over Schöneberg to well-known monuments such as the Brandenburg Gate or the former Museum of Arts and Crafts, the Martin Gropius Bau. The four-part work "Tageszeiten” (Times of the Day) from 1977 is also one of his Berlin pictures. Depicting the view from his studio on Dessauer Strasse, the work shows the very sphere between the artist's private world and the anonymity of the big city. As in a reversal of the earlier display window pictures, the world, the city of Berlin and its torn reality are now represented in a section seen from the studio. With succinct compositions rendered with sparse painterly means, Hödicke’s "Tageszeiten" symptomatically capture the spirit of West Berlin at that time. They put the city in a nutshell, so to speak. Hödicke's pictures are just as important for understanding Berlin and its mental climate at that time as Werner Heldt's emblematic pictures were for the the post-war period.

In the “Tageszeiten”, Hödicke reflects what he sees with his 'mental' eye. Having become an external image, it has an effect on the inner eye of the beholder. The light, deliberately staged here and its decisive influence on the content of the motif has also become pictorial here in an almost monochrome color scheme: the inexpressibility of feelings. Jörn Merkert, art historian and former director of the Berlinische Galerie, emphatically speaks of a "completely unreal light in the painting" (K. H. Hödicke. Malerei, Skulptur, Film, Berlin 2013, p. 76). Hödicke himself accompanies our eyes, gives them direction, asking us not to linger on the window frame or sill for too long , to focus our curiosity on what is happening behind the window. Frames and sills only mark a boundary between this world and the afterworld. Hödicke expresses his romantic view of the Berlin truth confined by a window and dispenses with a figure shown from behind, as we know it from Caspar David Friedrich.

This 'famous' view through the open window is an intimate motif from paintings of early German Realism. An early example comes from Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, who accompanied Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Italy in 1787, drawing him looking backwards out of the window of his apartment in Rome (Weimar, Goethe Nationalmuseum). The sitter in the painting "Frau am Fenster" (Woman at the Window) by Caspar David Friedrich is the artist's wife, Christiane Caroline, née Bommer, from Dresden (1793–1847), whom he had married in January 1818. Friedrich shows his wife in front of the window section in his studio in Dresden. We see an almost empty room, broad floorboards, naked walls and a window sill with two bottles and a glass on a tray. The view from the window shows the river Elbe, the mast of a ship passing by and a row of poplars on the opposite bank. For this purpose, the sitter opens a special type of window shutter, which is attached to the inside of the window embrasure with the purpose to regulate the lighting of his work space. Darkening the lower part of the window, Friedrich was able to regulate the intensity of light that shone directly onto the work-in-progress through the north-facing window. In order to reduce the shadow effect, Friedrich also had an unusually thin window cross installed.

In contrast to Friedrich, Hödicke concentrates less on the here and now of the inwardly opened window, which emanates a certain bourgeois appeal with the plants and flowers on the window sills, but rather on big city motifs, on the architecture outside his studio, which he colors evenly behind mysterious foils in colors ranging from a hopeful green of a morning to the shadowless, midday’s dirty yolk, the glowing rust of the evening to the night’s deep dark blue. [MvL/AR]