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Indepth Arts News:
"Uwe Wittwer"
2009-08-24 until 2009-10-03
Haunch of Venison, London
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
For his first solo show with Haunch of Venison in London, Swiss painter Uwe Wittwer (b. 1954) has embarked on a new body of work that carries on his artistic research on the authenticity and truth of images and the role of the artist as image hunter and voyeur. The show focuses on latest paper works in watercolour and inkjet and gives an introduction to recurrent motifs in the artist’s oeuvre: Old Masters paintings, still life, interiors and genre scenes. A series of new inkjets deal with the issue of voyeurism and privacy; the vaguely recognizable interiors are based on images of homes for sale in suburban London that were sourced on estate agent’s Foxtons website.
A major installation entitled “The Class of Beauty” shows various table vitrines, each dedicated to an iconic artist that Wittwer treasures: Friedrich, De Hooch, Kalf, Klee, Poussin, Ruisdael, Titian and Warhol. In a loose and associative manner, they assemble monochrome watercolours showing either a detail from a specific reference work or a major, virtuosic rendered topic of that artist. Two large format watercolours of a primary class in bygone times sum up the installation, evoking the serenity of an archive of cultural importance that yet bears the artist’s very personal aesthetic code.
Uwe Wittwer’s source material is carefully chosen from digital representations - images of images - which he researches in the depths of the internet. In consequence, he denies the conventional hierarchy of media in favour of his engagement with images. His dominant interest lies in the artistic momentum of levelling and balancing out the pictorial qualities of the source material in one of his three preferred techniques: oil painting, watercolour and inkjet. While the works are figurative, Wittwer is more accurately a painter of images; the unifying principal of the pictorial and his very own painterly style make the three techniques resemble each other. His motifs may recur in all media and collate his work to a coherent universe. It is this dreamlike certitude of aesthetic logic that characterizes the panoptic imagery of Uwe Wittwer and connects the viewer immediately to his universe.
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