Andreas Werner is a widely acclaimed German-Austrian artist whose drawings, collages, and prints translate the Romantic tradition of landscape painting into the 21st century.
Read MorePredominantly working on paper in small-scale formats, Werner creates scenes that meld visions of abstracted science fiction with highly realistic drawings often inspired by the Brutalist architecture of his youth in the GDR.
Werner was born in the then-East German town of Merseburg, an industrial area that he described as being 'covered with coal dust.'
On his first childhood trip to Berlin, he recalled being struck by the monumental grey buildings on the Karl-Marx-Allee, which he would return to as a visual motif as his practice matured.
Werner and his family fled to Austria shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and his experience of the collapse of the political idealism of communism would also be ever-present in his practice.
Werner began his studies not in art but in theatre, film, and media studies at the University of Vienna in 2003. Although remaining interested in those fields, he quickly realised he preferred to create art himself rather than learn from the art of others, and moved to the University of Applied Arts Vienna to study graphics and printmaking.
In 2007, Werner moved again to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and studied graphics and printmaking under the artist Gunter Damisch, graduating with distinction in 2012.
Werner's inspiration to paint landscapes came when he visited the Kunsthalle Hamburg on a residency in Northern Germany, where he encountered Caspar David Friedrich's The Sea of Ice (1823—1824). The devastating scene shows a ship—named Hope—bursting and sinking into icy water. Werner recognised the Romantic tendency towards escapism—then a reaction against Industrialisation—and recognised a similar sentiment in the 21st century.
Once describing himself as a 'Romantic of the new millennium,' Andreas Werner's practice is heavily rooted in an emphasis on emotion and utopian landscapes that both refer to and float above the real world.
Veering between abstraction and realism, his landscapes and obelisks incorporate the visual style of Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927) with graphically rendered geographical strata and ancient temples from worlds untouched by humankind.
Directly after encountering Friedrich's The Sea of Ice, Werner reinterpreted the painting in the form of a series of small-scale graphic works called 'Iceberg, Landscape and Vastness' (2011—2012). This became the title for his diploma exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2012, where the works were displayed on the wall in sporadic configurations, forming 'narrative strands of association.'
Some works depict the iceberg purely as a silhouette that descends far below water level, others as precisely hatched line drawings. Yin Yang (2011) shows two icebergs—white above the surface and black below—the emphasis on the long stretch of ocean provided by dotted paper allowing the eye to sink down into 'contemplation.'
Moving away from the purely representational, Werner created the series 'some roads to somewhere' for Galerie Hilger Brotkunsthalle Wien in 2013.
These small-scale collages and drawings visualise the geological dimension of nature, which is another key fascination for the artist. In works like geology II (2013), Werner hand-replicated layers of seismographic trace lines in an almost mechanical manner, evenly spaced and sloping upwards, so that the combined effect creates what could be striations in a rocky outcrop.
In 2019, Werner created the series 'WE DREAMED OF A PAST FUTURE', which turned away from earthly landscape to fictional worlds inspired by the work of Polish writer Stanisław Lem.
During his residency at the Nida Art Colony in Lithuania, Werner was inspired by Lem's The Star Diaries (1957) and the protagonist's journey to other worlds. The monochromatic pencil drawings he produced were heavily inspired by Constructivist architecture, far less graphic and more heavy and expressionistic than his earlier works.
Werner is the recipient of many awards and residencies. He has been awarded various grants by the State of Lower Austria, the City of Vienna (both 2020), Saxony-Anhalt (2017), and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (2016), as well as the MUSA Prize for Young Art (2016), the Recognition Prize for Fine Arts in Lower Austria (Culture Prize) (2016), the Mentoring Prize from L'Office Budapest 'BAH 13' (2014), and Second Place at the Art Prize Parz (2011). He has held residencies in Ireland, Hungary, Croatia, and Austria.
Andreas Werner has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include GALAKTAL. Andreas Werner, Kunsthalle Krems (2021); Through the deep black void. Andreas Werner, Galerie Krinzinger Schottenfeld, Vienna (2021); Andreas Werner — searching in the shadows of light, Sägehaus artlodge, Verditz (2021); WE DREAMED OF A PAST FUTURE | Andreas Werner, VILTIN Gallery, Budapest (2019); Andreas Werner — Science und Fiction in der Methode des Zeichens, Krinzinger Lesehaus, Hadres (2018).
Group exhibitions include Why Austrians Now? Austrian Expedition, The Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Vilnius (2021); Unter Tausend, Galerie Schloss Parz, Grieskirchen (2021); Summer Exhibition, Galerie Heimo Bachlechner, Graz (2021); Akademie Auktion, Semperdepot, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2021); What about us?, VILTIN Gallery, Budapest (2020).
Werner's website can be found here, and his Instagram can be found here.
Annie Curtis | Ocula | 2021
