“Still Life Negative after Mignon” by Wittwer via Uwe Wittwer
A new body of work and the first solo show titled “Raised Hide†of the Swiss artist Uwe Wittwer is currently on view at Haunch of Venison in London, UK. The show is comprised of a series of works on paper, in watercolor and inkjet, which represent Wittwer’s continued inquiry into authenticity of images and the truth of perspective. All of Wittwer’s prints and paintings are sources and are downloaded from the internet before undergoing a perceptual and physical transformation. In the tradition of Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, Wittwer adapts and reclaims photographic and digital images as his own translations of artistic vision. He explores the role of artist as a voyeur and image generation and his visions are available to the public until October 3rd, 2009.
Related Links:
Uwe Wittwer: Raised Hide, Haunch of Venison, London [Financial Times]
Uwe Wittwer [Haunch of Venison]
Catastrophes in Sepia: On Uwe Wittwer’s Recent Watercolors [Exhibition Catalog]
More text and images after the jump…
Portrait of Uwe Wittwer by Comenius Roetlisberger via Uwe Wittwer
A major part of the installation “The Class Beauty,†offers a fresh approach to Uwe Wittwer’s persistent themes of re-examining Old Masters’ paintings, interior and genre scenes and still lives. Seven glass vitrines encase Wittwer’s studies of select details from paintings he greatly admires. These include Warhol, Titian, Ruisdael, Poussin, De Hooch, Klee, Kalf, and Friedrich – all treated with the lens of painterly watercolor and conceptual theory where gaze and imaginative layering win over subject matter.
One of the watercolors titled “House Negative” via ArtRabbit
The other part of the exhibition consists of three large inkjet prints of Wittwer’s play on the masterpieces depicting the Battle of San Romano by Uccello – originals of which are housed in the National Gallery of London, the Uffizi, and the Louvre. These classical references are juxtaposed with works reproduced from digital image snapshots taken during the Vietnam War that Wittwer accidentally came across while researching the art of Dutch Renaissance painter Pieter de Hooch. By the means of layered transformation Uccello’s glorious pieces of colorful, yet static history, become distilled in poetic complexity, in contrasting dynamism of line and abstraction. Wittwer plays with the postmodern acceptance of reappropriation of artworks and simulates the concept into haunting reality where images actively demand the gaze of the audience.
