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Andreas Wachter
Howard Kanovitz | | |
Exhibition Dream and Reality in Contemporary Art:
works by Andreas Wachter and Howard Kanovitz
Opening: ArtSunday, 13th March 2005, 12.00 16.00 h.
Exhibition: 14th of March 26th of April 2005
Opening Hours: Thurday Friday 3.00 to 7.00 p.m.
and by appointment
Why the current debate on realism seems so surreal!
Bernd Fesel, qualified economist
The exhibition "Traum und Wirklichkeit/Dream and Reality" is our contribution to the current debate on realism. We want to show that realism and painting are not a new invention, not even in Leipzig, but has a decades long tradition and this worldwide. This fact is exemplarily documented by the painters, Andreas Wachter (Leipzig) and Howard Kanovitz (New York), who come from different generations and different cultural circles. The ideology of abstraction the dominant force over decades has hindered and, in part, prevented a broad public engagement with realist painting. When, in the early 1990s, we wanted to show Wachter at art fairs, we were told this was not modern or contemporary art. Many realists have still today not been adequately acknowledged or represented in museums. However to proclaim a new ideology or a new realist era is also not a solution, but will only lead to old-new prejudices and clichιs.
This side-by-side presentation of Wachter and Kanovitz allows us to focus on the artists themselves and their work, whose singularities and distinctions in this way become clearer to the viewer. It is this historical and international context that helps an art-interested public to a fair judgment of the artists and their achievements.
Harold Kanovitz provokes visual irritation by means of the contrast between hyperrealist detail and the over-riding, abstract pictorial system. Seemingly small interventions give the depiction a new twist. The overlapping of illusion and reality, not the ennobling of the banal, is his theme. In this way he reproduces on-hand realities and, at the same time, invents new ones.
Harold Kanovitz was a disciple of Franz Kline. His works influenced by Hopper and photorealism have been shown twice at the documenta. Kanovitz lives and works in New York. We thank the Galerie Inge Baecker, Cologne, for their support in realizing this exhibition.
Andreas Wachter portrays persons and scenes from everyday life that reveal how unrelated they are right in the midst of a crowd, even how bottomless the ground is right in the midst of walking on it. By way of the dance, of leave-taking, all the way to the journey and the arrival, the viewer experiences Wachter's figures in close coexistence, in the perspectival confusion of a superposed in-and-on each other. Figures and ground, fore- and background appear as a composition of non-communication, which the colors, the light and shadow, however, do not reflect as hopeless. Wachter sets the vision of the future against the rigor of the quotidian. In the midst of a sad farewell, the assurance of a perhaps still undetermined destination is felt. In his realist scenes and figures Wachter lets us experience situations that he then transforms into dreams and hopes.
Andreas Wachter studied under Arno Rink and Volker Stelzmann and lives in Grimma near Leipzig.
February 2005
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