Uwe Wittwer

Dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, numer­ous cultural assets were either dis­placed or destroyed. Many art treasures remain lost today. Swiss artist Uwe Wittwer takes up this still incomplete chap­ter of recent history in the framework of his fourth solo show at Galerie Judin, show­ing around 100 new works.

The se­ries Im Wider­schein—Scherben brings together the thematic con­cerns that have shaped Wittwer’s work over the past 25 years, link­ing his interroga­tion of the canon of art history to an inter­est in fugac­ity, loss, and the fad­ing of mem­ory. Due to his fam­ily history—his father and grand­par­ents lived in Ger­many before and dur­ing the Sec­ond World War—there is also an ele­ment of auto­bi­og­ra­phy involved. Nonethe­less, this is not a nos­talgic search for traces, but a study of the power of images and the endurance of standards of art history.

Destroyed, lost, and res­cued artworks form the point of depar­ture for these appro­pri­a­tions. The artist thus assem­bles a whole range of items of Euro­pean cul­ture that today only exists as mem­ory. Neuschwanstein Cas­tle, which is treated in his oil paint­ing Menetekel, can be con­sid­ered an emblem of this visual mem­ory. The Nazis stored exten­sive hold­ings of their plun­dered art in this iconic edifice. What was brought together in this loca­tion, which Wittwer allows to appear against a dark background, would become a gloomy pre­mo­ni­tion of Ger­many’s own cultural losses. Mis­appro­pri­ated art treasures are also reflected in the paint­ing Fig­uri­nen neg­a­tiv, which shows Meis­sen porce­lain fig­ures from a Jew­ish pri­vate col­lec­tion that were lost after their forced auc­tion. The paint­ing Nike von Samoth­rake, in con­trast, is based on the careful removal of the Lou­vre’s cel­e­brated marble sculp­ture, which was lifted out of the museum using ropes and brought to safety. Mas­ter­pie­ces by Nicholas Poussin, which were also saved for sub­sequent gen­er­a­tions, served as the point of depar­ture for the large format oil paint­ings Baccha­nal nach Poussin and Jagd nach Poussin. In a sense, these works form the foun­da­tion of this exhi­bi­tion: with these reflec­tions on art history, Wittwer devel­oped the style of his new se­ries.

The paint­ings Reiter neg­a­tiv nach Vivarini and Kleiner Spiegel and the 94 water­col­ors from the se­ries Im Wider­schein are ded­icated to the tragic end of a Berlin museum evac­u­a­tion. They are artis­tic reflec­tions of the approx­i­mately 500 lost paint­ings from the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, a col­lec­tion that today is on view at Berlin’s Gemäldega­lerie and Bode-Museum. In 1941, the museum’s Old Mas­ters were moved from Museum Island to the Flakbunker Friedrichshain, a newly built mil­itary complex. In the days after the Ger­man capit­u­la­tion, every trace of the paint­ings that had remained in the bunker—usu­ally because they were too large to be moved to safety in mine­shafts like the rest of the col­lec­tion—was lost. The hold­ings, includ­ing ten paint­ings by Rubens and three by Car­avag­gio, were prob­a­bly destroyed by fires that broke out in the unguarded bunker. Based on black and white illus­tra­tions of this lost museum, Wittwer devel­oped a cycle of water­col­ors that all use the same col­ors and com­po­si­tional effects of de-famil­iar­iza­tion. Just as in the artist’s oil paint­ings, the com­po­si­tions the works refer to here are var­ied, over-painted or turned into neg­a­tives. In par­tic­u­lar, meth­ods of collage are uti­lized. Wittwer chooses sec­tions of the paint­ings and combines their var­i­ous ele­ments. Frequently, ele­ments of the works are simply cut out. By way of inter­ven­tions such as this, Wittwer’s works reflect the vio­lent excess of the war. In the paint­ing Reiter neg­a­tiv, based on a photo­graph that records the arrival of troops on horseback, this artis­tic scar­ifica­tion is combined with actual wartime destruc­tion. All that attests to the con­quered city are the archi­tectural skeletons that remain. And the victors in Wittwer, too, are but spec­tral shad­ows of them­selves.

With his paint­ings and water­col­ors, Wittwer combines the artis­tic past and pre­sent in impres­sive visual cre­ations. Based on a canon of styles and motifs famil­iar to us from the piv­otal col­lec­tions of Euro­pean art, he cre­ates an endur­ing sense of unsettle­ment, open­ing aes­thetic and motivic inter­s­tices. The artist’s declared goal is to lead the beholder to the space between the famil­iar and the unfa­mil­iar.