Norbert Erwin Witzgall - Nose is a nose is a nose

NORBERT ERWIN WITZGALL
Nose is a nose is a nose
6 November - 11 December 2011
Opening Saturday 5 November 15:00 - 18:30

Painters, with their anachronistic need for isolation and their attachment to ‘métier’, have rather become exceptions on today’s artscene. This is certainly true for Norbert Witzgall, who concentrates on one single genre: the portrait. However, by researching its possibilities and testing its conventions, Witzgall takes the painted portrait far beyond its traditional intentions. In each of his works a system of references – stylistic and iconographical choices – is at play. In other words, in Witzgall’s oeuvre the portrait ceases to exist as a genre, and becomes a language.

As an iconographical basis for his works, Witzgall appropriates all kinds of portraits, borrowed from carefully selected photographic source materials. His choice ranges from pictures of glamorous Hollywood stars found in magazines and photographs of relatives he only knows from the family album, to renditions of Old Masters or posed portraits of friends.
This appropriation process often couples an omission of redundant pictorial elements with a quite faithful, almost academic imitation, as it were, of one or more features of the original portrait. Often, Witzgall also uses collage to assemble the composition. Some aspects of the way he builds up his works, however, betray a more complex, contradictory attitude. Within one and the same pictorial treatment, Witzgall not only idealizes his subject but also questions the medium.

Driven by the melancholy of someone who wants to embrace but keeps a distance, Witzgall creates portrait after portrait. They are marked by a tension between passionate surrender and cool irony, and they breathe enigma, romantic unease, and psychic ambiguity. Like the unforgettable Dirk Bogarde in Visconti’s ‘Death in Venice’, Norbert Witzgall only touches with the eyes. He is obsessed with the relationship between viewer and artist, or image and picture. In Witzgall’s work, this obsession is split up in micro-relationships between fascination and denial, fiction and memory. Maybe Witzgall is also trying to disappear into the portraits he creates.

Be that as it may, Witzgall has developed an unusally fascinating language, at times reminiscent of the Biedermeier epoch, pop culture, Dada, and Surrealism. Within a wide array of methods, some return frequently. The degree of academicism and precision in the way photographic images are transferred to canvas for example, is often countered ironically by the use of out-dated painting techniques. Witzgall also tends to temper his own obvious love for painting by fixing materials to the canvas, like dadaist poetical quotes. In several works, strokes of colour cover part of the surface as if the artist felt like disturbing the image. And if there is a space or perspective within the painting at all – the figures are often held in a non-descriptive space – it is mostly distorted in a way reminiscent of folk art, or simply impossible.
As a result of this approach, each portrait becomes an equally important fragment of Witzgall’s personal mirror. Rather than stereotypical samples of one and the same signature, Witzgall thinks of them as interchangeable parts of an ever evolving, equivocal image system. This in turn defines his exhibition practice: at Deweer, just like in other shows, Witzgall will arrange his works into ensembles. Some of the works have recently been shown in a four person show at the Kunstverein Nürnberg.

Norbert Witzgall was born in 1976 in Münchberg, Germany, and currently lives and works in Berlin. He obtained a degree from the Universität der Künste in Berlin. He recently had solo and duo projects at SOUTERRAIN and Autocenter, Berlin, and took part in groupshows at Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nuremberg, Studio Kara Walker, New York, Centro Ricerche Accademia di Brera, Milan, TÄT, Berlin and many other venues.

Exhibition hours Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday from 14:00 until 18:00, and by appointment.