Mrs. Ulrike Eldracher, Ph. D. wrote about the Painter:

As a child of not even six jears Frieder Mache proved his artistic talent by modeling a Xmas crib from clay. He was born in October 12, 1945 in Stuttgart, Germany. At the High School he enjoyed the productive art instruction. During this time he was interested in works of van Gogh, Degas, Holbein an Italian masters. Chinese and Japanese paintings associated. He bought a photo-camera as he was sixteen jears old. He took photographs in black-white followed by those in colours. He had a period of drawing before he started in 1989 with water colours mostly on vacation trips and week ends because he worked as an orthopedic surgeon in his own practice.

As he moved 1998 from Germany to the isle of Crete, where he has in the olive grove just beside his house his atelier, he painted some series as mythological themes or dreamed faces.

Frieder Mache is able to treat numerous techniques. He works for example with red chalk or colored pencil just as easy as he paints aquarelles, gouaches, with acrylic color, oil color or mixed techniques. The female figure, the human face, nature – he realizes landscape and city views exactly in the same lightly manor as still lives. The reality is not very important for him and is arranged purely in his imagination. The picture is finished before his mental eye and afterwards it comes to picturization.

The fast conversion of a natural impression ensures Frieder the water colors. A present immediate nature connection makes him to translate it usually into color intensive, moving with more or less density of imagery, which records the atmospheric moment with its special light conditions and typical features of the region. Frieder does not copy the reality but he translates his way to see into his color connection, which he dissolves first in abstract spots and zones in order to realize it afterwards again in a new found picture structure. The painted context of the picture shows then from its own strength the typical signs for example of Malta, Lanzarote, Tunisia or Crete. There are seldom landscapes you can easily walk in. Frieder shows from him new arranged, because from him so felt and experienced, color worlds, which are individually, expressively strong and intensively bright. Frieder feels and accordingly paints color chords, which are the expression of the pictures context. While in the most aquarelles the color flow, black outline structures sometimes appeare. The transparency and luminosity of the colors remain.

A further large topic represents the female figure. Due to Frieder Maches medical training he is able to draw and paint figures from off-hand. Primarily the female roundness, which he illustrates sumptuously, interests him. It is the same, which technique he avails – the women he shows are nearly all naked in the most difficult floats or positions. Nevertheless the views Frieder selects in each case he is able to under-proof even the most complicated proportions and shortenings to the movement variety he converts it in his pictures. If he represents “only” faces he often uses his rolling technology by laying a color film with the role, so that a kind of “cubist” develops with prismatic broken color structure which dissolves the face into abstract patterns. Not very often he paints sharp-edged, frightened, sad faces stepping out from the darkness which are closer to death than to life. Death and war have also in a set of acryl paintings a high value. Burning fields and cities as well as soldiers, battlegrounds and cemeteries are illustrated. Glow-red conflagrations and dark color express the feeling. Frieder did not see it actually but he saw as a child all the destructions after the 2. World War. He put the expression of his picture-worlds into the expression of the strength of the colours. The pictures keep simultaneously their fantastic, mysterious, removed or simply only Mediterranean pulsated character. Frieder gives each individual picture a special expressive note. Self-willed in color and styling he illustrates and gives each landscape - city or figural picture the substantial theme. In order to reach this, he has to break inevitably the external reality so that afterwards he makes arise the picture abstractly or in an abstract imagery. Instead of the reality appears the new painted reality of his own. Their color-form-connections are the true picturization of the picture-themes.

Translated by Karin Mache