EXHIBITIONISM: The Art of Display: Uwe Wittwer
The sixteenth artist from EXHIBITIONISM is Uwe Wittwer…
Uwe Wittwer is a Swiss artist, living and working in Zurich whose work features painting, watercolour and inkjet prints. Wittwer’s work often references the history of art as he explores the role of the artist as an image hunter and voyeur. His sources are chosen from digital representations of existing artworks found on the internet which he borrows from. This trend of translating photography into painting was started by Gerard Richter in the 60s and has been carried on in the last decades by artists such as Wittwer and the Belgian Luc Tuymans. His exploration of the ‘authentic image’ is effective in the medium of inkjet. Wittwer’s works are visually striking as intelligently postmodern reinterpretations of subject matter and medium. The oblique references in Family After Gainsborough, Negative are distanced as we realise this is an image of an image of an image.
His After Gainsborough series is fascinating as he manipulates well-known works, in this case by inverting the original into negative and playing with strong contrasts of light and dark. The use of inkjet to achieve this appropriation is sophisticated and lends itself well to the composition, though it loses some of the intimacy of the original. It is interesting to note that the figure that Wittwer decides to ‘wipe out’ with his negative is the man of the Byam family while his wife and child remain as prominent ghost-like figures. Wittwer has also chosen to eliminate the landscape of the background, choosing instead to bleach and stain it with blots of ink. Thus Wittwer’s appropriation is no longer a family portrait but an experiment in the authenticity and manipulation of images.
Family After Gainsborough, Negative, 2009
Inkjet on paper
