Matthias Weischer: Sequence

Matthias Weischer is perhaps best known for refined paintings of strange domestic spaces set in remote places and ambiguous time. A renowned German artist of the New Leipzig School, Weischer is in top form in Sequence, only his second US solo exhibition. The show features nineteen oil or egg tempera on canvas paintings of interior scenes—rather like expansive, uncanny living rooms—and a group of seven so-called iPad drawings, actually C-print photos of relatively tame still lifes. Each of these arcane images—at once nostalgic and faintly futuristic—conveys a rarified, almost pungent atmosphere that is as evocative as it is unnerving. The paintings’ surfaces of richly nuanced textures and subtly modulated colors describe inviting milieus, although their multiple perspectives with abstruse walls, floors, and ceilings, can be quietly and subversively destabilizing.

Located in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, where Weischer was a student in the late 1990s through the early aughts, was once a school in which Socialist Realism was de rigueur in the mandated art education program. Since 1989, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the unification of Germany, Leipzig artists, maintaining the technical refinement associated with the Academy but experimenting with far more adventurous imagery, found an international audience for works that are basically figurative, yet not exactly realist or surrealist. Unlike works by other painters associated with the Leipzig School, such as Neo Rauch, Rosa Loy, and Tim Etel, Weischer’s compositions explore spatial relationships in more abstract terms of irregular geometric forms and fields of color that encompass novel effects of light and shadow.

A friend and protégé of David Hockney early in his career, Weischer (b. 1973) arranges theatrical 3D tableaux in his studio, which he uses as a basis for his compositions. An array of recurring decorative motifs abound in the work: florid wall patterning, potted plants, vessels, and other objects commingle to impart an unexpected dramatic impact. Diminutive figures do sometimes appear but mainly in the paintings-within-the paintings—hazy depictions of medieval icons or early Renaissance artworks—hanging on the walls of the rooms, as in Kammer II and Saint (both 2023). Pairs of small, almost identical compositions that the artist refers to as “twins,” include Krieger and Mönch (both 2023). Here, a schematic rendering of a reclining robed male figure in each work could represent a Japanese nobleman from the Edo period, but also recalls a denizen of a Middle Eastern kasbah. Weischer acknowledges the influence of Japanese art in works such as Tagasode (2023), whose title refers to a Japanese poetic phrase alluding to the robes of a beautiful woman. The intricately patterned garments are seen here hanging on a rack to the left edge of the composition, while a large Japanese scroll painting of white flowers adorns the back wall.

The larger paintings in Sequence (up to 6 1/2-feet high) are devoid of human presence, but the spaces Weischer portrays are populated with birds and cats, or cropped and fragmented renderings of those animals, and the rooms are full of life and a certain thrilling visual cacophony. The hind quarter of a large, bifurcated cat appears in a number of works, including Cat and Parrot and Brunnen (both 2023); the latter work’s creature resembles a leopard, surreptitiously sneaking out of the room toward the lower left, just below an arrangement of small colorful rectangles floating in space. It is an improbable, nearly absurd image, yet wholly convincing and captivating. One of the most striking works on view, Shell (2023) features a spotlit corner space enlivened by a kind of Matisse-inspired still life of stylized purple vases and a turquoise seaweed-like stalk hovering just above the floor. Toward the lower right a scallop shell holding a large pearl rests atop a pile of bright blue fabric tied up with red rope, the bundle heaped precariously upon a rather wobbly-looking table.

The series of recent photo works, dubbed iPad paintings, displayed separately in a lower-level gallery, are experimental for Wiescher. For the series, he used the Procreate software program, which simulates brushstrokes and certain lighting effects that the artist found to be correlative to his painting technique. The slick and rather cold surfaces of the resultant C-print images, however, cannot match the density and intensity of his painted canvases. And the rather static, centralized photographic images of vases of flowers and potted plants suggest none of the enigmatic scenarios that invigorate the canvases. Weischer offers in each of the paintings an alluring space—a place one might like to get lost in, and perhaps never return.