Layered, and revised, Wolfgang Betke's paintings consist of abstract landscapes and faces, however the focus of his rich compositions is the process and physicality of painting itself.
Read MoreBetke will often scrape, scratch, smear, or corrode the canvas to revise or cover layers. As paint builds up or the canvas is teared, the space occupied by the image expands beyond the two-dimensional plane.
Such revisions can be noted in his early paper works of modified magazine images, which include an untitled portrait from 2012 that depicts a man with his face scraped off, while the upper left corner of the image is missing.
Expanding into literal space, the 2013 installation Paravent / Installationsansicht shows an aluminium folding screen painted and scribbled with permanent marker, depicting an abstracted landscape of scratched marks.
Its 2014 version, Paravent, is a free-standing two-panel sculpture painted with gestural strokes that depicts spiritual motifs alluding to re-birth and creation, while the 2015 Paravent appears as a four-panel folding aluminium screen decorated with bright flowers.
Betke's works materialise creations on their own terms across mixed-media compositions. Portraits like Stand Humanismus (2015) or Mann (2016) contend with existential dilemmas as a physical problem, with outlines of faces and fading visages punctuated by swathes of colour, where artmaking becomes the solution to the void of existence.
Later paintings like Lao Tse Werden (2021), in which one might imagine the ancient Chinese philosopher's head emerging from a floral landscape, reflects the tensions between following existing pathways, as the founder of Daoism would advocate, or pursuing one's own; the final painting finds resolution in the contention that one may do both.
Mythological and religious undertones equally appear in paintings like Time of the monsters (2019–2010) and Rotten subjects will not prevail (2018). The first is a sea-bound odyssey of sorts, in which the artist's sanded surfaces are visible, evoking layers of time and a process of working backwards within the painting's timeline.
