German artist Matthias Weischer is known for his association with the New Leipzig School of German painters, which emerged at the end of the 1990s. He gained renown for his illusory and experimental 'pulp paintings', using a mixture of oil paint and cotton-fibre papier-mâché to create artificial landscapes and staged interiors.
Read MoreBorn in Elte, Germany, Weischer began studying at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig) in the mid-1990s, where he was a student of Professor Sighard Gille. He graduated with an MA in 2003.
Weischer rose to prominence in the early 2000s as a member of the Neue Leipziger Schule (New Leipzig School), a German painting movement which also includes artists Neo Rauch, Tim Eitel, and Tilo Baumgärtel. In 2002, Weischer co-founded the artist-initiated gallery LIGA in Berlin.
Weischer's paintings drift between representation and abstraction, and experiment with artifice and shifts in perspective. His compositions navigate the tensions between disorder and harmony, the realistic and the imagined.
Weischer's pulp paintings are distinct for their tactile quality, made with oil paint and cotton-fibre papier-mâché, ground and smeared on canvas. His early paintings of interiors contained objects that were often painted over and repainted, resulting in visible layers, drips, smudges, and marks, with even pieces of masking tape sometimes remaining in the final work. The artist describes the interiors as having 'psychological moments', with each object eliciting various possible associations or interpretations. In a conversation with Ocula Magazine, Weischer stated: 'I was playing for a long time with these possibilities of the interior and these relationships of the objects to each other'.
In 2007, Weischer received a scholarship that enabled him to work at Villa Massimo in Rome. There, he began to adopt a more painterly technique, and expanded his palette to include the soft tones of medieval Italian frescos. While his earlier works possess a sense of theatricality, composed almost like staged theatre sets, Weischer's landscapes invite a more active interpretation of the details within a scene.
To construct his landscapes, Weischer renders a scene from his memory, filling in the gaps with various motifs. In this sense, his natural landscapes become playful composites. A solo exhibition of Weischer's landscapes was held at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in 2008.
Weischer returned to interior spaces in his later practice, incorporating depictions of figures and domestic elements. Often working in series, depicting similar spaces across multiple canvases, the artist presents subtle changes in colours, spatial orientation, and inhabitation within each painting. The addition of a dimensional stucco border around his canvases express a renewed attention to the painting surface.
In the series of three 'Flat' paintings (2019), Weischer presents multiple snapshots of an interior reminiscent of a hotel room, across which furnishings and personal items are scattered. Flat 3 (2019) includes an unidentified figure reclining on the bed.
Weischer has received numerous scholarships, including the Laureate of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative with David Hockney (2004), and the scholarship of the Deutsche Akademie Rom, Villa Massimo (2007). In 2005, he received the Leipziger Volkszeitung award and the August-Macke-Preis, and in 2007 he received the Helmut-Kraft-Stiftung award.
Matthias Weischer has presented works in solo and group exhibitions across Europe, Asia, and the United States.
Select solo exhibitions include Mirrors and Things, KÖNIG GALERIE, Seoul (2022); Spiegels, GRIMM, Amsterdam (2021); Bühne, Drents Museum, Assen (2020); KÖNIG TOKIO, Tokyo (2020); Stage, GRIMM, New York (2020); KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin (2019).
Select group exhibitions include Someone said that the world's a stage, GRIMM, New York (2021); WHO AM I, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (2020); Away in the Hill, GRIMM, New York (2019); Deutschland 8: Next Generation — Young German Art, Whitebox Art Center, Beijing (2017); Three Positions. Six Directions, KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin (2017).
Matthias Weischer's website can be found here, and his Instagram can be found here.
Amy Lewis | Ocula | 2022
