K. H. Hödicke came to Berlin in 1957 and studied painting with Fred Thieler. Born in Nuremberg in 1938, motifs of the big city became one of the artist's most important themes over the years. With mostly large-format works in bold colors and unconventional perspectives, he increasingly developed into a characterful chronicler of modern city life. His motifs are diverse and range from the sky above Schöneberg to well-known architectural monuments such as the Brandenburg Gate, the former Museum of Decorative Arts, and the Martin-Gropius-Bau. The four-part work "Tageszeiten" (Times of Day) from 1977 also falls into the category of his Berlin pictures. It shows the view from the studio window on Dessauer Straße and depicts the sphere between the artist's private world and the anonymity of the big city. In a reversal of his earlier shop window paintings, the world, the city of Berlin, and its torn reality are now depicted in the view from the studio. With "Tageszeiten," Hödicke succeeds in painting images that symptomatically capture West Berlin at that time with minimal painterly effort and succinct compositions. They bring the city to the point, as it were. Hödicke's pictorial inventions are as important and accurate for understanding Berlin and its mental climate at the time as Werner Heldt's emblematic images are for the postwar period.

With "Tageszeiten," Hödicke reflects what his mind's eye sees. Thus transformed into an external image, it has an effect on the viewer's eye. The deliberately staged light and its decisive influence on the content of the motif have also been rendered pictorially here in an almost monochrome color scheme: the essentially indescribable nature of feelings. Art historian and former director of the Berlinische Galerie Jörn Merkert emphatically speaks of a "completely unreal light in painting" (K. H. Hödicke. Malerei, Skulptur, Film, Berlin 2013, p. 76). Hödicke himself guides our eyes, directing them not to linger too long on the frame and window sill, but to focus their curiosity on what is developing behind the window frame; the window frame and window sill merely mark a boundary between this world and the next. Hödicke combines, or rather assembles, his romantic view of Berlin's reality, limited by the construction of the window, and generously dispenses with a figure seen from behind, as we know from the work of Caspar David Friedrich, for example.

This famous view through an open window is an intimate pictorial motif of early realism in Germany. An earlier example comes from Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, who accompanied Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Italy in 1787 and drew him looking backwards out of the window of his apartment in Rome (Goethe National Museum, Weimar). The woman depicted in Caspar David Friedrich's painting "Woman at the Window" is the artist's wife, Christiane Caroline, née Bommer, from Dresden (1793–1847), whom he married in January 1818. Friedrich shows his wife in front of the window in his current studio in Dresden, An der Elbe 33. We see an almost empty room, the wide floorboards, bare walls, and a windowsill with two bottles and a glass on a tray. The view from the window shows the Elbe River, the mast of a passing ship, and a row of poplar trees on the opposite bank. The woman in the painting opens a special type of shutter that is attached to the inside of the window reveal and was designed by the artist to regulate the light in his studio. By darkening the lower part of the window, Friedrich can regulate the amount of light that could fall directly onto the painting he is working on from the north-facing window. Friedrich also had an unusually thin window crossbar installed to reduce the shadow effect.

In contrast to Friedrich, Hödicke focuses less on the here and now of the window sashes, which open inward in different ways, with plants and flowers on the window sills suggesting bourgeois comfort, and more on motifs of the big city, on architecture outside his studio, which he colors evenly behind mysterious color foils, from the hopeful green of the morning to the shadowless, dirty midday yellow and glowing evening rust red to the deep dark blue of the night. [MvL/AR]