Uwe Wittwer

Wittwer, who was included in the major exhibition Watercolour at Tate Britain, London in 2011, debuts in South Africa with New Works. Organised in collaboration with Haunch of Venison, London, the exhibition comprises twenty paintings produced over the last year.

I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture

So that there are times when both pictures disappear

And other times when they’re both manifest

That vibration is basically, what the work’s about for me –

That space in between where there is no picture

But rather a void, a forgetting

Sherrie Levine

(Why I Appropriate, 2002)

Understood broadly as “the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work”, it is 1970s Appropriation Art with which Wittwer shares leitmotif. In this new body of work the artist adopts and adapts anonymous, unfamiliar but somewhat recognizable images. These include still lifes, interiors, family portraits, genre scenes and Old Master paintings. Wittwer digitally processes these found images by mirroring, inverting, blurring, distorting, under- and over-exposing, omitting, isolating and layering the image’s original elements.

He renders these appropriations with his signature style in various media – oil painting, watercolours or inkjet prints.

New Works exemplifies the notion of the ‘image’, and therefore raises questions surrounding innovation, originality and authenticity. Entirely new spaces and ultimately new images appear. The cumulative interactions and tensions between the ‘already-there’ and the modified sit on the edge of comfort – blurring the distinction between old and new. Wittwer acquaints the viewer with a new mode of looking. His paintings avoid obvious interpretation – distant and fractured, they resonate with an intuitive intimacy and subtle beauty.

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Uwe Wittwer: SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

Artist

Uwe Wittwer

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