The two artists Walter Wolf and Peter Valentiner have been friends for many years. ln the exhibition "Ceci n'est pas une rétrospective" at the Stadtmuseum Siegburg, the aim is to explore the commonalities of their artistic works in the different positions. Walter Wolf, born in Trier in 1963 and resident in Cologne since 1992, shows in his more recent works how he consistently develops his figurative motifs. Wolf makes his colours himself from pigments and then layers them one on top of the other. In the layers, images develop of the ambivalences and injuries of human existence. These memory pictures have a hint of the childlike about them, leading the viewer onto the rough terrain of the former. The freedom that other painters see in non-objective bursts of colour never interested Wolf. The freedom of his painting no intoxication of boundlessness; he unfolds the freedom of man in the body of a melancholy loneliness that gives his figures a sad beauty. In contrast, the Frenchman Peter Valentiner, born in Copenhagen in 1941, who has also lived in Cologne for many years, shows neither unrestrained intoxication nor dreamy playfulness in his works. His works are characterised by clarity of thought and the purposeful implementation of a concept. Between a kind of honeycomb pattern and industrial grid surfaces, Valentiner gradually developed a nameless structure beyond fixed meanings from the idea of the "camouflage net as a system of forms". His compositions initially convey a sense of the disorder of an apparently arbitrary nesting of forms, which eventually leads to the certainty of the strict order of a structural grid. Valentine's black and white paper works shown in Siegburg are created with the help of the computer. The compositions usually revolve around the central axis and function in their uniformity with only minimal deviations as an almost meditative series.
.
A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
A three-dimensional "drivable" version of the exhibition will be available at the beginning of the exhibition at: http://www. siegburg.de/museum/25Ceci/3D.htm
Comments