MATTHIAS
WEISCHER
About
the
Origin
by Matthias Weischer
CHEES NOOTEBOOM
CHEES NOOTEBOOM
© Matthias Weischer, Alcove (Detail), 2019, oil on canvas, 131.5 x 121.5 cm
How does a work of art develop?”, the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom asks in a poem in his 2018 volume Monk’s Eye, for which the painter Matthias Weischer contributed small landscape watercolors.
The question of art's origins thus arose through this unique publication in a double sense: between two arts (painting and poetry) but also between two generations. A dialogue emerged through this occasion between Nooteboom the poet (b. 1933) and Weischer the painter (b. 1973), whose work along with that of Neo Rauch, Tim Eitel, and David Schnell, bore the moniker of the “New Leipzig School”. In Weischer own words, "I try something on the canvas and see whether it is possible or a mistake”. But does that already explain the magic involved in a work's creation? How do his paintings come into being, these abstract, stage-like, strangely empty spaces in which you never quite know whether you are looking from inside to outside or the other way around?
Furniture, chairs, tables, and everyday objects, sometimes animals, plants, and stretches of land, as well as fragments of the real world, are visibly collaged onto the paint and used like citations. In the end, every detail, it seems, has its own inevitable place within the whole. But you can’t tell how art comes into the world, you only recognize it once it is there.
