Matthias Weischer - part 1

Some more contemporary painting. This is part 1 of a 2-part post on the works of Matthias Weischer, a painter from Leipzig, Germany, who is gaining international acclaim from critics and collectors for his individual work, and through his association with David Hockney.

Dr Jean-Christophe Ammann, former director of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst: “I understood that I was confronted with a real painter, and not only with somebody who is moving the brushes around, as is often the case today,” said in 2001 when he first saw Weischer’s paintings – and bought one for the museum’s collection.

Weischer enrolled at the influential Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts) in 1995 and, following three years’ tuition with a master painter, received a diploma with distinction in 2000. His paintings explore space through the construction and deconstruction of imagined interiors, creating rooms within rooms and building up layers of paint, while simultaneously creating overlapping perspectives. The interior spaces Weischer paints are the stage sets of everyday life, often decorated with patterned carpets, furnishings or other props. The recipient of the 2002 prize for young artists in Saxony, Weischer has received several grants for his work, which is exhibited at galleries, museums and institutions in Europe and the United States. Most recently, he was invited to exhibit eight paintings at the prestigious Venice Biennale. An entire room of the Italian Pavilion was dedicated to his work.

“The central focus of my art work is the fusion of the experience of space and time,” says Weischer who acknowledges that there are both parallels and differences between his paintings and those of his Mentor David Hockney, his lifelong “model”.

David Hockney is very appreciative of Matthias Weischer’s work and reflects fondly on his time spent with him. “His work interested me at first because of his attitude to pictorial space and as I got to know it, more layers were revealed,” Hockney says. “He knows looking is a very positive act. The more one looks the more one sees. His skills as a draughtsman are revealed here, the deep pleasures of the hand, the eye and the heart.”

Note: Sizes where given are rounded up or down to the nearest whole centimetre:

Title and date unknown

Title and date unknown

2001 Familie 0-Mittag oil on canvas 190 x 240 cm

2002 Untitled oil on canvas 102 x 120 cm

2002 Untitled oil on canvas 190 x 170 cm

2003 Chair oil on canvas 190 x 170 cm

2003 House oil on canvas 180 x 240 cm

2003 Interior oil on canvas 75 x 96 cm

2003 KO oil on canvas 75 x 85 cm

2003 Living Room oil on canvas 170 x 190 cm

2003 Untitled 11 oil on canvas 150 x 300 cm

2003 Zweiteilig (Bisected) oil on canvas 235 x 304 cm

2004 Automat oil on canvas

2004 St. Ludgerus oil on canvas 300 x 251 cm

2006 Tuch (Cloth) oil and tempera on canvas 150 x 200 cm

2008 Zwölf Blicke (Twelve Eyes) oil on canvas 120 x 200 cm

2009 Bühne mit 9 Objekten oil & egg tempera on canvas 200 x 400 cm

2009 Die blaue Wand (The Blue Wall) oil & egg tempera on canvas 200 x 300 cm

2010 Ab oil on canvas 40 x 30 cm

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