Uwe Wittwer Biography

In his paint­ings, water­colours and inkjet prints, Swiss-born Uwe Wittwer (*1954) sub­verts and calls into ques­tion the beholder’s view­ing habits and expecta­tions. The enchant­ing beauty and sensu­al­ity of his works are often only a lure that, upon closer inspec­tion, gives way to the latent horror lurking behind the façade of bour­geois ways of life. All of Wittwer’s works dis­play a delib­er­ate hazi­ness, which removes the motives from imme­di­ate read­abil­ity. The still-lives, inte­r­i­ors, landscapes and por­traits are not rep­re­senta­tions of a vis­i­ble real­ity, they are rather tools for ques­tion­ing our own view­ing habits. Wittwer’s se­ries, devel­oped over a long per­iod of time, inquire into the overrid­ing ques­tion of image, effect, and real­ity—an almost exis­ten­tial ques­tion in the age of the inter­net and the result­ing diffi­culty of dis­tin­guish­ing between “real” and “fake”. The inter­net is thus also one of Wittwer’s main sources in his search for motives. The point of depar­ture for this appro­pri­a­tion of images was an intense encounter that the artist had with the Old Mas­ters in the London National Gallery. On the inter­net, he chanced upon ama­teur photographs taken by Amer­ican sol­diers dur­ing the Vietnam war, show­ing the banal­ity of quo­tid­ian mil­itary life. Wittwer went one step fur­ther back into history with his interpreta­tion of photographs depict­ing the frag­ile idyll that was Eastern Prus­sia before World War II. Wittwer engages with these se­ries not in chrono­log­ical order, rather, he repeat­edly takes up their motives in new works. This simulta­ne­ous, increas­ingly focused devel­op­ment of se­ries allows the artist to reflect on the under­stand­ing of an image through­out the entire breadth of differ­ent media, over­throw­ing the estab­lished hier­ar­chies (small draw­ing—large paint­ing). Here, too, the viewer has to rethink his view­ing habits and expecta­tions.