Markus Wegenmann
bel étage
01.07. – 19.08.2007

Markus Weggenmann (1953) lives and works in Zurich and Berlin.

For several years now, his artistic works have been created according to the principle of “blow-up,” i.e., specialized craft businesses turn much smaller designs (gouaches) into large-format high-gloss lacquer paintings, prints, or even hand-tufted carpets. Weggenmann also calls this process an “abstraction of painting,” meaning that the finished artworks, which the artist himself does not touch, are images of the original small-format paintings on paper transformed into a different material medium.
Weggenmann’s works, which appear so delightfully unorthodox and lie transversally in the art landscape, satirize, gloss over, and ironize in order to be closer to the essence of painting.
And indeed, when we enter the main room of the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, we are confronted with a sea of colors and shapes that we can walk through, look at, and cross. We climb the gallery and from this “bel étage” we gain an overview of the floor paintings below. They are colorful, hand-tufted wool carpets. The motifs may be reminiscent of amoebas, fruiting bodies, holes, or clouds, but they are definitely translations and exaggerations of painting. The traces of color appear frozen, heavy things seem light, light things seem heavy, color weights are turned upside down, colors are presented in highly unusual combinations. But for Weggenmann, it is a matter of course that “every color can be combined with every other color.”
The second, smaller room of the Kunsthalle is much quieter. We see five lacquer paintings, unusually delicate and reduced in color for Weggenmann’s works. They are “reconstructions” of a gestural, almost pre-objective style of painting reminiscent of plants. With his paintings, executed by a car painter according to precise instructions, and his succinct directness, which is full of irritations, Weggenmann dismantles any artificially created, intellectually idealizing superstructure. Basically, these “abstractions of painting” constitute the subtle explosiveness of his “beautiful” works.

The exhibition was made possible with the kind support of Pro Helvetia and the Cultural Office of the City of Bremerhaven.

Curated by Klaus Becké.