Image-Architectures full of beauty and horror
Welcome to Western as well as global image thoughts, to the image architectures by
Wolfgang Zandt, a young painter from Berlin, coming from the far city of Regensburg. He
studied seven years at the Art Academy Berlin-Weissensee and pushed his degree
certificate 2010 and added one year as a master student with Prof. Werner Liebmann after.
This teacher was and remains an important person for Wolfgang Zandt, even if the younger
has long floated free and follows a separate, independent program.
We can get to know the PNEUMA of his painting in these spaces of the cultural center on
the basis of six large-format, great shaped canvases and in four smaller paintings which
all have arisen in the last two years. In addition we get some insights into his etchings
upstairs.
But let´s get to this later. The priority is set on the paintings, the room heights of
this villa happily concede the dominating appearance of the canvases. Wolfgang Zandt
announces a DUEL in the exhibition title. I think he has understated, there are several
DUELS. He reluctantly he uses the word fights, perhaps because it sounds too militant,
too consumed in our medially heated everyday language of the 21 Century.
The generation before him seems already tired from permanent fights. Duel, that sounds
fresher, more factual, more sporty, more exciting actually. It also includes the
important playful element of willingness to controversy and altercation. But let's not
forget, the duel is also about winning or losing, perhaps even survival or demise.
Concrete stories are not told by Wolfgang Zandt. His paintings are devoted to different
life processes or ideas, visions like nightmares of our global world, which keep the
inhabitants of the planet Earth every day breathless. In the Internet world the real
distances to the authentic places play hardly a role ; you can quickly enter into an
event or leave it just as quick by clicking out. In Zandt's paintings (and the graphics)
one would rather stay. But the images of perception overlap, faster than we would like.
We are so used to some real events and things or they are macabre that sometimes we
repress or would like to forget them. For a while we succeed in this purpose. But then
the facts, the real pictures of this or any other place or event reach us again, form
links in the head with new examples: nuclear and natural disasters, civil wars,
revolutions of existing orders. Felt chaos is everywhere. Out of chaos a new order grows,
that´s what W. Zandt is convinced of.
In its production through the centuries, art has become a brilliant recycler of
dislocations, human crises and wars. Contemporary artists benefit, whether visible or
hidden, consciously or unconsciously, from the image materials, tools and materials of
their predecessors.
The appellatively blazing red in Wolfgang Zandt´s painting "Occident" on the invitation
card reminded me spontaneously to the colour blaze in Hans Grundig´s hell scenario of
burning Dresden. In the memory of my picture stock, the quiet, reflective river of the
dramatic events in Zandt´s image narrative gets close to the colour suction of the
modern, later on in two dictatorships ostracized Dix-student. Although I did not consider
that the younger painter had the same impulse as me, I was at least surprised that he
knew the template. Also Zandt's painting is thoughtful, but not silent. It allows doubts,
without being pessimistic or sentimental, not even on an issue such as DAWN. Poetry is
gone there. It flashes and shrugs yellow-green: a departure from rigidity and dark. Then
there are also substances and moments where the artist is caught by the witty, ironic and
profound thinking way of thinking and painting. We discover it at the latest when we face
his blue GOLF PALACE, full of colorful paint stains and splashes. This painting might be
described as the soloist of the show. Impetus for its formation was the story of the
disgraced House of Culture of the former East German Republic in the new center of
Berlin. The duels to the preservation or demolition in favor of the resurrection of a
counterclaimed and quite antiquated, misplaced castle idea appear to the younger incoming
observer as the image of a years between demolition and conversion fluctuating clownish-
lively, crazy site.
A remarkable feature of the implementation of the image concept is the massive use of
contemporary means. In addition to brushing with acrylic and oil paints the spraycan is
used. Zandt hurls at specific points the color paint onto the canvas, which smooths and
closes parts of the painting surface, making other areas appear as brittle-porous open
wounds. Zandt's always moving, structured pictorial spaces shine and blaze within all
their themes and visual materials from their innermost being, the core. Just as if he had
literally poured oil on the fire, yellow light is blazing in the TOWER OF MVALLEY in the
surrounding area. The painter heats up the situation explosively with such color swirls
in order to lead it afterwards with all the available means and promptings of color and
shapes to a return to calmer tracks. And he actually succeeds with cool calculus as a
virtuoso anger or irony to bring the unleashed chaos in the gesture of the total image
under control, leading it into a new order. Even NECROPOLIS, the surreal, ghostly
graveyard of the mind, remains as a strong artistic character reminder an active,
optimistic picture.
These paintings are almost all composed by the same principle: Center and peripherals are
opposite each other, although the center migrates from work to work to another place,
which also ensures that the viewer doesn´t get to feel something like tiresome
repetitions. Instead, they offer infinitely many eyes stimuli between beauty and pain.
Is art that allows the appearance of tremendousness able to be felt as beautiful,
aesthetically beautiful? Wolfgang Zandt is aware of the ambivalence and importance to
this question and affirms. Basically, he says, that´s exactly its or his chance to
express seeing and thinking adequately in his works. On the one hand he draws clear
boundaries - between worlds of art and documentary reality, between the principle of
destruction and construction. On the other hand, there´s no pure harmony in the finished
image even. Even when the risk in the context of the core now appears transfixed, for
example toxic-green ribbons and circles, which are making their way out, donate
sufficient agitation and discomfort. (NAPALM)
Zandt´s images are inherent in a complex, universal view without getting in the need of
specifying a firm statement. He´s always amazed by the different interpretations that the
viewers of his works offer him. It is interesting, but also irritating for him when
they´re recognizing also figures in the largely abstract structures.
Of course he deliberately placed objects or characters, such as, inter alia, the palm
tree and the wheel or the tower. But he didn´t anchor figures in his pictorial spaces, or
at least he had not set himself that purpose. And if it should have occurred to him in
the long course of the meal, then he would certainly have noticed it and would have taken
countermeasures. In any case he did not specify his works into a certain style. He
considers Gerhard Richter´s words: "My pictures are smarter than me."
Without a doubt – Zandt´s images are not only built safe from the center to the
peripheral edges, they are expressive, changeable, individually for sure. The Painter
simulates with almost philosophical inspiration the global madness. He characterizes
operations where traffic jams or fixed structures sometimes forcibly dissolve and thereby
offer opportunity for the emergence of something new. In his case - a new image.
I first took notice of Wolfgang Zandt more than a year ago, when he presented printworks
with students of the Weissensee School of Art in the Gallery Turm in Friedrichshain. His
five black-and-white metaphorical landscapes hung in the center of the room. For me they
meant the entre as well as the finals of the Adventure Lands Printmaking , an impulsive
art of black and white contrasts on handmade paper. Therefore I am excited that some of
these etchings executed in the technique of line etching, cold needle and aquatint are
also seen here. They indicate in the bulging vocabulary of signs, the extreme
entanglement of layers and the enormous density of information their independent
existence, they are no designs or aftermath of his pictures.
The character stock offers besides the old children's game MIKADO, whose operation he
chose for the structure of a sheet, also MONUMENT VALLEY . It is an area of mesas on
the border between Utah and Arizona. Zandt knows : The area is considered as a peaceable
advertising area, it is the Wild West scenery for tourists and filmmakers. There Ford
turned and his westerns and later Sergio Leone his " Play Me The Song Of Death ."
Why shouldn´t it therefore also be useful for his tower-etching and the JACKPOT? The
artist keeps his melting pot of collisions and mutations with the permanent transfusion
of expanding lines, spots and colors cooking.
Granted: Words fail one a little breath whin the increased turbulence and virulence of
all these thoughts and images. But the also in mathematics, physics , information theory,
and social sciences versed "Young Master" is - to stay in the literary picture here – at
the end sovereign Lord of the spirits he called. Check out yourself!
main menu
Texts/Press
Astrid Volpert: Opening of the Solo-Exhibition DUEL of Wolfgang Zandt, Art
Society Centre Bagatelle, Berlin-Frohnau
Wolfgang Zandt, a young painter from Berlin, coming from the far city of Regensburg. He
studied seven years at the Art Academy Berlin-Weissensee and pushed his degree
certificate 2010 and added one year as a master student with Prof. Werner Liebmann after.
This teacher was and remains an important person for Wolfgang Zandt, even if the younger
has long floated free and follows a separate, independent program.
We can get to know the PNEUMA of his painting in these spaces of the cultural center on
the basis of six large-format, great shaped canvases and in four smaller paintings which
all have arisen in the last two years. In addition we get some insights into his etchings
upstairs.
But let´s get to this later. The priority is set on the paintings, the room heights of
this villa happily concede the dominating appearance of the canvases. Wolfgang Zandt
announces a DUEL in the exhibition title. I think he has understated, there are several
DUELS. He reluctantly he uses the word fights, perhaps because it sounds too militant,
too consumed in our medially heated everyday language of the 21 Century.
The generation before him seems already tired from permanent fights. Duel, that sounds
fresher, more factual, more sporty, more exciting actually. It also includes the
important playful element of willingness to controversy and altercation. But let's not
forget, the duel is also about winning or losing, perhaps even survival or demise.
Concrete stories are not told by Wolfgang Zandt. His paintings are devoted to different
life processes or ideas, visions like nightmares of our global world, which keep the
inhabitants of the planet Earth every day breathless. In the Internet world the real
distances to the authentic places play hardly a role ; you can quickly enter into an
event or leave it just as quick by clicking out. In Zandt's paintings (and the graphics)
one would rather stay. But the images of perception overlap, faster than we would like.
We are so used to some real events and things or they are macabre that sometimes we
repress or would like to forget them. For a while we succeed in this purpose. But then
the facts, the real pictures of this or any other place or event reach us again, form
links in the head with new examples: nuclear and natural disasters, civil wars,
revolutions of existing orders. Felt chaos is everywhere. Out of chaos a new order grows,
that´s what W. Zandt is convinced of.
In its production through the centuries, art has become a brilliant recycler of
dislocations, human crises and wars. Contemporary artists benefit, whether visible or
hidden, consciously or unconsciously, from the image materials, tools and materials of
their predecessors.
The appellatively blazing red in Wolfgang Zandt´s painting "Occident" on the invitation
card reminded me spontaneously to the colour blaze in Hans Grundig´s hell scenario of
burning Dresden. In the memory of my picture stock, the quiet, reflective river of the
dramatic events in Zandt´s image narrative gets close to the colour suction of the
modern, later on in two dictatorships ostracized Dix-student. Although I did not consider
that the younger painter had the same impulse as me, I was at least surprised that he
knew the template. Also Zandt's painting is thoughtful, but not silent. It allows doubts,
without being pessimistic or sentimental, not even on an issue such as DAWN. Poetry is
gone there. It flashes and shrugs yellow-green: a departure from rigidity and dark. Then
there are also substances and moments where the artist is caught by the witty, ironic and
profound thinking way of thinking and painting. We discover it at the latest when we face
his blue GOLF PALACE, full of colorful paint stains and splashes. This painting might be
described as the soloist of the show. Impetus for its formation was the story of the
disgraced House of Culture of the former East German Republic in the new center of
Berlin. The duels to the preservation or demolition in favor of the resurrection of a
counterclaimed and quite antiquated, misplaced castle idea appear to the younger incoming
observer as the image of a years between demolition and conversion fluctuating clownish-
lively, crazy site.
A remarkable feature of the implementation of the image concept is the massive use of
contemporary means. In addition to brushing with acrylic and oil paints the spraycan is
used. Zandt hurls at specific points the color paint onto the canvas, which smooths and
closes parts of the painting surface, making other areas appear as brittle-porous open
wounds. Zandt's always moving, structured pictorial spaces shine and blaze within all
their themes and visual materials from their innermost being, the core. Just as if he had
literally poured oil on the fire, yellow light is blazing in the TOWER OF MVALLEY in the
surrounding area. The painter heats up the situation explosively with such color swirls
in order to lead it afterwards with all the available means and promptings of color and
shapes to a return to calmer tracks. And he actually succeeds with cool calculus as a
virtuoso anger or irony to bring the unleashed chaos in the gesture of the total image
under control, leading it into a new order. Even NECROPOLIS, the surreal, ghostly
graveyard of the mind, remains as a strong artistic character reminder an active,
optimistic picture.
These paintings are almost all composed by the same principle: Center and peripherals are
opposite each other, although the center migrates from work to work to another place,
which also ensures that the viewer doesn´t get to feel something like tiresome
repetitions. Instead, they offer infinitely many eyes stimuli between beauty and pain.
Is art that allows the appearance of tremendousness able to be felt as beautiful,
aesthetically beautiful? Wolfgang Zandt is aware of the ambivalence and importance to
this question and affirms. Basically, he says, that´s exactly its or his chance to
express seeing and thinking adequately in his works. On the one hand he draws clear
boundaries - between worlds of art and documentary reality, between the principle of
destruction and construction. On the other hand, there´s no pure harmony in the finished
image even. Even when the risk in the context of the core now appears transfixed, for
example toxic-green ribbons and circles, which are making their way out, donate
sufficient agitation and discomfort. (NAPALM)
Zandt´s images are inherent in a complex, universal view without getting in the need of
specifying a firm statement. He´s always amazed by the different interpretations that the
viewers of his works offer him. It is interesting, but also irritating for him when
they´re recognizing also figures in the largely abstract structures.
Of course he deliberately placed objects or characters, such as, inter alia, the palm
tree and the wheel or the tower. But he didn´t anchor figures in his pictorial spaces, or
at least he had not set himself that purpose. And if it should have occurred to him in
the long course of the meal, then he would certainly have noticed it and would have taken
countermeasures. In any case he did not specify his works into a certain style. He
considers Gerhard Richter´s words: "My pictures are smarter than me."
Without a doubt – Zandt´s images are not only built safe from the center to the
peripheral edges, they are expressive, changeable, individually for sure. The Painter
simulates with almost philosophical inspiration the global madness. He characterizes
operations where traffic jams or fixed structures sometimes forcibly dissolve and thereby
offer opportunity for the emergence of something new. In his case - a new image.
I first took notice of Wolfgang Zandt more than a year ago, when he presented printworks
with students of the Weissensee School of Art in the Gallery Turm in Friedrichshain. His
five black-and-white metaphorical landscapes hung in the center of the room. For me they
meant the entre as well as the finals of the Adventure Lands Printmaking , an impulsive
art of black and white contrasts on handmade paper. Therefore I am excited that some of
these etchings executed in the technique of line etching, cold needle and aquatint are
also seen here. They indicate in the bulging vocabulary of signs, the extreme
entanglement of layers and the enormous density of information their independent
existence, they are no designs or aftermath of his pictures.
The character stock offers besides the old children's game MIKADO, whose operation he
chose for the structure of a sheet, also MONUMENT VALLEY . It is an area of mesas on
the border between Utah and Arizona. Zandt knows : The area is considered as a peaceable
advertising area, it is the Wild West scenery for tourists and filmmakers. There Ford
turned and his westerns and later Sergio Leone his " Play Me The Song Of Death ."
Why shouldn´t it therefore also be useful for his tower-etching and the JACKPOT? The
artist keeps his melting pot of collisions and mutations with the permanent transfusion
of expanding lines, spots and colors cooking.
Granted: Words fail one a little breath whin the increased turbulence and virulence of
all these thoughts and images. But the also in mathematics, physics , information theory,
and social sciences versed "Young Master" is - to stay in the literary picture here – at
the end sovereign Lord of the spirits he called. Check out yourself!
main menu
Texts/Press
Astrid Volpert: Opening of the Solo-Exhibition DUEL of Wolfgang Zandt, Art
Society Centre Bagatelle, Berlin-Frohnau
