The painting "Parklandschaft" (Park Landscape), created in 1910 during Heckel's most intensive "Brücke" period, immediately captivates the viewer with its impressive colourfulness, which alternates between green and blue tones. It is complementarily interrupted by reddish-brown nudes and, despite all abstraction, a landscape densely overgrown with trees is revealed, which becomes perceptible in particular through a narrow path and a small bridge that divide the picture horizontally in the middle. Although the structures of the trees are also discernible through the vertical contours of the reddish-brown tree trunks, in the green of the treetops, whose closed canopy of leaves seems to extend far beyond the upper edge of the painting, colour and form develop a life of their own, distancing themselves to the extreme from the object. Especially in this part of the painting, but also in the foreground, the painterly break with tradition becomes apparent. Colour as the all-dominant element displaces the details of the object, and painting exists solely for its own sake - as an expressive gesture of inner imagination. It is no longer the mimetic imitation of nature that is in the foreground, but the artist's very own sensibility that marks his departure into the artistic avant-garde.
After his trip to Italy in 1909, Heckel's painting style changed decisively: he developed a looser, faster style of painting with diluted oil paints and his brushstrokes followed the line even more resolutely and dynamically. Formally, there is a concentration on the essentials and his palette becomes brighter and more colour-intensive. Heckel visibly moved away from an impasto approach to painting that was still strongly in the tradition of Van Gogh's painting and found his unmistakable painting style as a protagonist of the artists' group "Die Buecke".
From 1907 to 1910, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff spent the summer months in Dangast, a small fishing village on the German North Sea. The pristine nature and the proximity to the sea were the ideal environment for the artists - which they also found at the Moritzburg Lakes and in the immediate vicinity of Dresden, where Heckel went to paint together with Kirchner and Pechstein. The painting "Park Landscape" was also created here; presumably it is the bridge over the Prießnitz at the Klotzsche waterfall in the Dresden Heath.
