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Painting versus alternatives to the exhibition? Erno L. Vroonen (freelance curator, Frankfurt) looks at the interest awakened at the recent Art Basel Miami Beach Fair by European painting, particularly by a series of artists hailing mainly from Leipzig. This former East German city has become a focus for artists, gallery owners and a whole range of initiatives and exhibitions that are creating a high profile for what has emerged as an intense context. The Bulletin continues to centre on the art produced in concentrated work contexts—in this case, perhaps one of the farthest removed.
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ERNO L. VROONEN
A visit to the Art Basel Miami Beach Fair in 2004 made it very clear that there was a major interest in painting from Europe. This is nothing new; in the early 1980s, the explosion of the Neue Wilde and the Transavanguardia Italiana succeeded the more conceptual movements, such as video, body and land art. Then, the need for painting had lasted a decade and had been brought to a halt by photography. Is there a parallel today?In a recent interview, Harry Lubke of the Berlin-Leipzig gallery Eigen+Art was not afraid to refer very directly to this historical fact by arguing that today’s art lovers were tired of putting up with more than 20 minutes of video works in exhibitions. Indeed, if we think back to the last Documenta or the Venice Biennial, just to mention the two most important, the experience seemed like something more than time robbery.
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It would have been stupid not to see the video works since they were on display, yet those loops required a lot more time and attention than looking at a traditional painting. Lubke argued that this was certainly a major reason why painting has become popular again. This may not be a spectacular explanation, but there seems to be some truth in its simplicity.
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| Matthias Weischer, Fernsehturm, 2004 |
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It is very possible that people want to go back to concentrating on a fixed item; amid the turmoil of digital data and information, a ‘still’ painting allows the viewer to once again be the master of his or her own time experience. After all, time is a major issue in today’s world.
What is a contemporary time experience? What is it made of? Do we control it, or is this pure illusion? What does the relation between time and space consist of? And, in the context of this article, to what extent can these questions be answered by a painting?
Let’s take a closer look at some German painters from Leipzig by way of reference. Since 2000, the Leipzig school of painting has gained yearly in importance, rapidly becoming known not just in Germany but also in America. It all started some fifteen |
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years ago in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. East and West were reunited and the richer West had to invest a lot in its poorer neighbour. In the early 1990s, a Leipzig gallery that had existed since the mid-1980s launched a campaign to put East German art in the international ArtIndex. That gallery was Eigen+Art, and the director’s name was Harry Lubke.
The East German academic system was a classic one. Over the years, students learned to draw and to use techniques and materials. They concentrated more on form than on content. In the years before the fall of the Wall, this was probably due to the political situation. In the 1990s, this changed. Students became more daring and started to reflect critically on their past experiences and their potential future. What form would it take with the disappearance from the scene of Communism? Was it really possible to create a world without the Communist past, or would they have to go back to the time before the regime? What was it like to feel free again?
One of the first painters to address these questions was Neo Rauch, who lived and worked in Leipzig. In his paintings, he combined the aesthetic of the early 1950s with the formal language of the Communist system. His images constitute a guidebook for a self-made society. His colours are old-fashioned and his style is absolutely figurative. Life was definitely too short for abstraction.
In 1999, Rauch became Professor of the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts. By that time, he was a well-known artist and a key figure at the Eigen+Art gallery. Most of the young painters at the academy were students of Professor Arnulf Rinke and were very familiar with Rauch’s work. In 2003, they opened a show called ‘Sieben Mal Malerei’ at the Contemporary Museum for Fine Arts in Leipzig. Jean-Christophe Ammann, former Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, opened the show, which was a great success. The artists presented were Tim Eitel, Matthias Weischer, Martin Kobe, Tilo Baumgärtel, Christoph Ruckhäberle, Peter Busch and David Schnell.
Some international collectors who were familiar with Eigen+Art got the first opportunity to go and see the artists in their studios. They bought early pieces and spread the word to other collector friends. A very shrewd initiative in this context was the installation of the Liga Gallery in Berlin, run by Christian Ehrentraut, a former assistant of Harry Lubke.
The Liga was in fact an artists’ space, financially supported by Leipzig artists, which existed for about two years. As a model it was much appreciated by collectors, who, in spite of good relations with well-known galleries, yearned for alternative spaces where they could discover the young and the new. They wanted a little bit of adventure.
Of course, the success of this Leipzig initiative cannot be put down to organisational aspects alone. The work itself had to be of a high quality and make sense in today’s art discourse, with the growing sensibility towards painting, not only in Leipzig.
In this context, it is important to recall the work of Michael Majerus, who died young in an air crash in November 2002. His eclectic work included different styles and possessed a comparable dynamic to special video animation effects. And there were others in Dresden, such as Eberhard Havekost. But the interest had to be fuelled by promising exhibitions, too. The Frankfurter Kunstverein organised a huge group show called ‘deutschemalereizweitausenddrei’, showcasing the work of, among others, Tomma Abts, Tim Eitel, Katherina Grosse, Andreas Hofer, Hendrik Krawen, Antje Mejewski, Bernard Martin, Jonathan Meese, Anselm Reyle, Corinne Wasmuth and Johannes Wohnseifer. Most of the paintings were on loan. The exhibition was put together rapidly by the Director, Nicolaus Schafhausen and fulfilled the need to show the art world that the renaissance of painting at the start of the new century was taking place in Germany.
Naturally, things were happening outside Germany, too. Strangely enough, the country that attracted most attention in this respect was a neighbour of former East Germany: Poland (of which more in a future article). |
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| David Schnell, Kollision
in der Baumschule, 2003 |
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| David Shnell, Gestänge 3, 2003 |
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Matthias Weischer, David Schnell
and Martin Kobe
But to return to questions about time and Leipzig: do the new paintings reflect different ways of experiencing time?
Matthias Weischer, for instance, confronts us with interiors of a disturbing sobriety and, to put it carefully, with an ugly mixture of items that only in their togetherness become elegant. The variety of styles does create a whole new world. The image is composed like a digital image of a room within a room, and the viewer becomes simultaneously outsider and insider. He is invited to become part of this strange interior, where an image of an artefact, a painting or a sculpture, returns him to the position of viewer. However, when the viewer adjusts to the vast amount of material and data, the artificial painted room turns into a 3D experience.
The same is true of the work of David Schnell, who paints studies of classical perspective in an apparently very simple way that makes them intriguing. In his well-calculated landscapes, objects are stopped in their movement. The viewer does feel that the artist needs to demonstrate his mastery in drawing architectural environments but at the same time something is missing. The level on which everything takes place is not equal to the represented ground level. The painted imagery on canvas is floating in the air, like a fata morgana. It is as though time has been stopped before space can achieve its final form.
In the work of Martin Kobe, things are composed with different elements of style, and what we see is some kind of strange architecture. Its constructions are multileveled in terms of content as well of form. They are complex houses of open and closed structures, and they reveal different approaches to painting, ranging from abstract lyricism and constructivism to hyperrealism, all coming together in a single image. These buildings do not give themselves up to our understanding. They shun the idea of normal order. They are living spaces in which, as in Weischer’s work, the viewer is always on two sides—inside and outside.
These three examples clearly show that architecture plays an important role as the ‘continuity of time and space’. The transportation of data that have been dealing with this problem has been stopped for a moment. In this instant, the painter brings to light what perhaps no-one has been able to see before. Needless to say, light plays an important role for each of these artists, guiding us through the architectural image, escaping from it and returning at an unexpected point.
Within these paintings, the relationship between time and space is translated into highly complex de- and reconstructed architectural landscapes. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish what is the product of reality and what is artificial. Although the image is static, our eyes are in permanent activity. Every single detail creates a movement, silently, mysteriously. All of it together is hard to capture at a single glance. These paintings borrow images from the computer screen; they are products of the new media age, in which time becomes a global experience. By means of the Internet, our time and space experience can be interchanged simultaneously all over the globe.
Naturally, these three young painters from Leipzig, a city that once belonged to the DDR within the Soviet Union, have been influenced by the change from social to capitalist society (de-and re-construction), but it would be wrong not to take in account the fact that they are also part of a new and future world. If the past is still reflected through colours and imagery, the present emerges in the approach of the ‘time and space continuity’ through the eyes of the new media.
Erno L. Vroonen, freelance curator, 13.01.2005 |
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