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拍品专文
'The painting Erfundener Mann can be seen as a reflective work that places the artist's situation before our eyes in a programmatic way. The pensive figure on the chair has images in his head; indeed, he consists largely of them. The utensil in his hand could be a brush. Could he be seen as an image of the artist? Opposite the figures head is a television, that is to say, a competing vision machine...What is arts relation to reality? The illusion as the paradoxical essence of painting is thematised by Weischer, and it is reflected in the title Erfundener Mann as well' (J. Nicolaisen, 'The World as Studio, the Studio as World', pp. 65-72, Matthias Weischer, exh. cat., Leipzig, 2005, pp. 70-72).
Erfundener Mann is an early masterpiece by Matthias Weischer, one of the foremost members of the acclaimed New Leipzig School. Created in the year that Weischer held his first international one-man show at the Wilkinson Gallery in London, the painting represents a very rare selfportrait of the artist. Its composition recalls artistic duo Ed and Nancy Kienholz's installation In The Infield Was Patty Peccavi (1981); a work that depicts an intimate interior scene with a pregnant female seated on the edge of a roughly made bed, mesmerised by a spiraling, glowing light. In Erfundener Mann, Weischer replaces this pregnant woman with an image of himself. This spectral silhouette appears to teeter on the brink of existence as a human: while the shape is recognisable, the body appears to have been constructed through a variety of materials, ranging from imitation wood grain to chicken wire, from a painting to a mysterious assemblage of concentric, colourful circles that recall the pictures of the Constructivists, of Jasper Johns and Ugo Rondinone, as well as ads and illustrations where something is being highlighted. Looking at the figure here, created through a seemingly scattershot range of explicitly varied painterly techniques, and indeed at the surroundings, it becomes clear that Erfundener Mann is an investigation of the entire nature of painting, and indeed of representation.
This is a key subject matter for Weischer, confirming his position at the forefront of the New Leipzig School, a group that was busy responding to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing Reunification of Germany. Weischer, in striking contrast to Gerhard Richter who left Dresden a generation earlier, deliberately decided to move to Leipzig. For the artist having grown up in an image-saturated world whose art scene was dominated by film, installations and abstraction, he moved to Leipzig to learn time-honoured techniques. These are in clear evidence in the range of effects that Weischer has included in Erfundener Mann, which serves as a metaphor for the dialogue between abstraction and figuration. Weischer contrasts trompe-l'oeil elements and perspectival constructions with the drips, swirls and gloopy masses more readily associated with Abstract Expressionism or Informel. Even the red and white tin on the counter holding the television, which may be paint or might hint at the protagonist's austere diet, also echoes Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, illustrating another of the artistic legacies which have to be confronted by a figurative painter working in the Twenty- First Century.
The incredible range of techniques and effects that are in evidence in Erfundener Mann reveal the artist's working practice: he allows his pictures to grow essentially organically, first creating the background room and then adding layer upon layer of content. In a sense, the picture becomes the very real and self-conscious record of the painterly process, a factor encapsulated by the figure at the centre of the composition, who appears to be holding a brush. Perhaps this is a cipher for Weischer himself: facing the modern images of television, he wonders whether his vocation and his medium are redundant. The only answer is to confront the canvas and intrepidly venture in: 'It wasn't so important what to draw, it was just important to draw and paint - just to keep on working without having any concrete subject or big vision' (M. Weischer quoted in A. Lubow, 'The New Leipzig School', The New York Times, 8 January 2006).
In Erfundener Mann, this invented man appears to be painting himself into existence. Shown in a studiolo-like room which is at once reminiscent of Old Master images of Saint Jerome, of Vermeer's interiors and of the images from post-war magazines which Weischer himself has culled for inspiration, this appears to be a timeless zone of contemplation, frayed and dated as are our own memories. There is a Spartan self-sufficiency in evidence which recalls pictures of saints in their hermit-like solitude, perhaps hinting at the loneliness of the path of the figurative painter.
Surrounding this surrogate painter, Weischer has illustrated emblems that continue the artistic debate: on the floor is a lurid polyhedron, an apparition that hints at its own three-dimensionality despite being painted. The artifice of the illusory depth of the painting is underscored by Weischer's inclusion of a picture within the picture on the wall, showing the same shape rendered 'in the flat'. This spectral object appears computer-generated and therefore modern, an anachronism against the backdrop of the patterned wallpaper and the cumbersome, primitive television. Yet it also recalls the astrolabes and orreries of the philosophers of previous eras, as well as the mysterious multi-faceted block in Albrecht Dürer's famous enigmatic print, Melancolia I. That sense of enigma reverberates through the generations in Weischer's Erfundener Mann, which is filled with a sense of nostalgia, and indeed of contemplative melancholy, as it seeks a path for painting in the
contemporary world.
Erfundener Mann is an early masterpiece by Matthias Weischer, one of the foremost members of the acclaimed New Leipzig School. Created in the year that Weischer held his first international one-man show at the Wilkinson Gallery in London, the painting represents a very rare selfportrait of the artist. Its composition recalls artistic duo Ed and Nancy Kienholz's installation In The Infield Was Patty Peccavi (1981); a work that depicts an intimate interior scene with a pregnant female seated on the edge of a roughly made bed, mesmerised by a spiraling, glowing light. In Erfundener Mann, Weischer replaces this pregnant woman with an image of himself. This spectral silhouette appears to teeter on the brink of existence as a human: while the shape is recognisable, the body appears to have been constructed through a variety of materials, ranging from imitation wood grain to chicken wire, from a painting to a mysterious assemblage of concentric, colourful circles that recall the pictures of the Constructivists, of Jasper Johns and Ugo Rondinone, as well as ads and illustrations where something is being highlighted. Looking at the figure here, created through a seemingly scattershot range of explicitly varied painterly techniques, and indeed at the surroundings, it becomes clear that Erfundener Mann is an investigation of the entire nature of painting, and indeed of representation.
This is a key subject matter for Weischer, confirming his position at the forefront of the New Leipzig School, a group that was busy responding to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing Reunification of Germany. Weischer, in striking contrast to Gerhard Richter who left Dresden a generation earlier, deliberately decided to move to Leipzig. For the artist having grown up in an image-saturated world whose art scene was dominated by film, installations and abstraction, he moved to Leipzig to learn time-honoured techniques. These are in clear evidence in the range of effects that Weischer has included in Erfundener Mann, which serves as a metaphor for the dialogue between abstraction and figuration. Weischer contrasts trompe-l'oeil elements and perspectival constructions with the drips, swirls and gloopy masses more readily associated with Abstract Expressionism or Informel. Even the red and white tin on the counter holding the television, which may be paint or might hint at the protagonist's austere diet, also echoes Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, illustrating another of the artistic legacies which have to be confronted by a figurative painter working in the Twenty- First Century.
The incredible range of techniques and effects that are in evidence in Erfundener Mann reveal the artist's working practice: he allows his pictures to grow essentially organically, first creating the background room and then adding layer upon layer of content. In a sense, the picture becomes the very real and self-conscious record of the painterly process, a factor encapsulated by the figure at the centre of the composition, who appears to be holding a brush. Perhaps this is a cipher for Weischer himself: facing the modern images of television, he wonders whether his vocation and his medium are redundant. The only answer is to confront the canvas and intrepidly venture in: 'It wasn't so important what to draw, it was just important to draw and paint - just to keep on working without having any concrete subject or big vision' (M. Weischer quoted in A. Lubow, 'The New Leipzig School', The New York Times, 8 January 2006).
In Erfundener Mann, this invented man appears to be painting himself into existence. Shown in a studiolo-like room which is at once reminiscent of Old Master images of Saint Jerome, of Vermeer's interiors and of the images from post-war magazines which Weischer himself has culled for inspiration, this appears to be a timeless zone of contemplation, frayed and dated as are our own memories. There is a Spartan self-sufficiency in evidence which recalls pictures of saints in their hermit-like solitude, perhaps hinting at the loneliness of the path of the figurative painter.
Surrounding this surrogate painter, Weischer has illustrated emblems that continue the artistic debate: on the floor is a lurid polyhedron, an apparition that hints at its own three-dimensionality despite being painted. The artifice of the illusory depth of the painting is underscored by Weischer's inclusion of a picture within the picture on the wall, showing the same shape rendered 'in the flat'. This spectral object appears computer-generated and therefore modern, an anachronism against the backdrop of the patterned wallpaper and the cumbersome, primitive television. Yet it also recalls the astrolabes and orreries of the philosophers of previous eras, as well as the mysterious multi-faceted block in Albrecht Dürer's famous enigmatic print, Melancolia I. That sense of enigma reverberates through the generations in Weischer's Erfundener Mann, which is filled with a sense of nostalgia, and indeed of contemplative melancholy, as it seeks a path for painting in the
contemporary world.