René Wirths
Das was bleibt
27.11.2016 – 01.01.2017

René Wirths presents us with large-format images of things we encounter in everyday life. As easy as the motifs seem to be to understand, it is initially more difficult to recognize the artist’s motivation. The artist is clearly not interested in the fleeting image. He is primarily interested in the processes before and behind the image, which he examines using the means of painting.

In the studio, the artist encounters his objects very directly. By staging them on a white background to fill the format, the painter removes them from their original context and subjects them to his typical image. René Wirths’ analytically observant gaze is directed at the object itself. The explicit frontal or profile view also makes this gaze appear emotionless, documentary, supposedly objective. But if one were to compare the real object or a photo of it with the respective image, differences would become apparent. We are deceived. We are so influenced by digital media that when we see reality depicted, we immediately associate the photo. Unlike photorealistic images, René Wirths’ paintings describe the sum of his immediate phenomenological observations of the three-dimensional object. He seems to want to get to some essence of these things and the world. And for him, this lies not in the things, but in his pictures.

René Wirths’ pictures document his encounters with the things of the world. The artist himself: “The process of painting and observing, the actual living thing, ends at some point. What remains is its testimony, a memory of the spirit of this process, the picture. For me as a painter, the processes are essential; that is why I can easily separate myself from the pictures afterwards. I have incorporated them into myself.” René Wirths’ painting process thus becomes a metaphor for life. What remains, the picture as a document of the past or the transient, symbolizes timelessness, death: Nature Morte! In the mirror of the things of this world, we can recognize ourselves as living beings.

DAS WAS BLEIBT, the title of the two exhibitions in the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven and in the Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin, refers in this sense to the spirit of the pictures in general and to René Wirths’ pictures in particular, as they reflect his visible world. The catalogue published for this exhibition also bears this title - and it will still be there when the two exhibitions are already history.

Andrea Fuest

Curated by Thomas Trümper.