Uwe Wittwer: Holzfäller.Spiegel

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zahnradstrasse, Zurich

In addition to several paintings in oil on canvas and large-scale charcoal drawings on paper, a series of sculptural paint on glass works will be on display, a technique which marks a new departure in Wittwer's extensive œuvre. Also a novelty will be a monumental wall drawing spanning across three walls of the large exhibition space.

 

In Wittwer's exhibition, the lyrical piece The Waste Land by Thomas Stearns Eliot assumes a central role. Literary works, as well as (art)historical sources or archetypes, on the basis of which Wittwer immerses himself in intensive research, have always been an important point of reference for him in his work. Eliot's 433-line epic poem features various poetical, cultural, or mythological allusions from the Western and Eastern canons, with references to Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, or Wagner depicting the alienation of modern life after World War I. Passages from Eliot's poem can be found embedded in an abandoned forest landscape of ravaged trees drawn in black and white on the walls in the first exhibition space.

 

In the center of the room, one encounters five free-standing stained glass windows (200 x 150m). In their irregular arrangement, they form a kind of hall of mirrors through which the viewer can move freely. The paintings on the glasses were handcrafted traditionally and carefully by Wittwer at the Mayer'sche Hofkunstanstalt für Glasmalerei und Mosaik (Mayer’s Court Art Institute for Glass Painting and Mosaic) in Munich, founded in 1847. The individual glasses refer to key motifs that are taken up in different ways in the exhibition, such as Waste Land.Fragment 2. In direct association with the large mural, it allows the viewer to reflect on a central verse from the aforementioned poem. The transparent glass, which is not painted over the entire surface, allows the sparse landscape of trees in the background to shine through occasionally, creeping into the glass like a quiet shadow, and meeting with the reflection of the viewer simultaneously. The motifs for Selbstportrait (Self-Portrait), Braumeisterhaus (Brewmaster‘s house) and Im Walde (Into the woods) are taken from the photo albums of the artist's parents and grandparents and offer an intimate insight into his family history of three generations. While Selbstportrait shows a young, already adult Wittwer, Braumeisterhaus (Brewmaster‘s house depicts his great-grandfather's house in Aargau.

 

Im Walde (In the woods) depicts a scene deriving from Wittwer's childhood, also to be found in the diptych Holzfäller.Spiegel (Woodcutter.Mirror) (see invitation card; oil on canvas, 42 x 62 cm, framed) in the second exhibition room, which plays an eponymous role for the exhibition title. The right canvas of the diptych shows Wittwer's father chopping wood in the forest. Wittwer himself stands by as a young boy and observes the scene. A forest landscape, denser and lusher than the mural, refers to Romanticism artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, while the woodcutting scene explicitly echoes a painting by Ferdinand Hodler. However, it is not the vigorous motion of the lumberjack figure that interests Wittwer, but rather its symbolic ambivalence. The monochrome colors, shades of blue, and omissions of color in the figures and the trees appear like a photographic template turned into a negative. The left side of the diptych shows details of the scene as if in a mirror, but the focus lies solely on the axe and the trees. The two figures are absent. Both canvases are primed with black paint, and the motif is painted into the bright, luminous areas.

 

Further oil paintings in various formats show motifs that are mirrored in fragments on the large-format charcoal drawings that can be found on the wall connecting the two exhibition spaces. These works  form a synthesis with Wittwer's earlier works, both in terms of motif and technique. Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) relates to a late medieval moral satire by Sebastian Brant, already adapted by Pieter van der Heyden. In works such as the Gaukler mit Schatten (Fool with Shadow) or Fluss.Camp (River.Camp), Wittwer works with alienating techniques, such as mirroring and a surreal color scheme with a complementary color effect, reducing the subject to its painterly potential. The diptych of the Trauriger Bacchus (Sad Bacchus), which is based on a famous Meissen porcelain figurine, radiates an entrancingly beautiful fragility that makes a direct reference to the glassworks in the first room.

 

In recent years, Wittwer's choice of media focussed on large-format watercolors in addition to oil painting. Now, with his charcoal drawings, he turns to a technique that had already accompanied him early on in his artistic work and then fell into oblivion for a long time. As with the glass paintings, the drawn subject is stripped from all color, allowing the individual scenes to be perceived without the visual power of the hues charged with associations. Instead of fluid color gradients, deep black outlines and expressive hatching take their place, charging the motif with a whole new emotionality. The contrast between hard contours and shadowy, softly drawn sections, as in Schatten über Schatten (180 x 134 cm), which is inspired by a still from the film Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983), shows the multifaceted potential of the technique, which at times takes on a painterly quality.

 

The exhibition ends in the gallery's small, intimate and cabinet like project space, which is dedicated to the large-format charcoal drawing Im Wäldchen nach Poussin (Into the woods after Poussin) (charcoal on paper, 180 x 240cm). Inspired by Poussin's group of figures of the Triumph of Bacchus (ca. 1640), Wittwer transfers the Old Master model into a forest devastated by battle. Contrary to the innocent title of the work, Wittwer here draws a clear reference to the famous Battle of the Ardennes of 1944. As if in a harmonious cycle, the viewer encounters the fragility of the idyll in this final space, which runs like a thread through Wittwer's work and finds its equivalent here in an atmospherically charged charcoal drawing of fascinating beauty.