seeing together - January 21 until March 04, 2023
Heinrich Küpper, Christian Weihrauch
We are looking forward to opening the Art Year 2023. At the beginning of the year, we would like to show you drawings by Heinrich Küpper, who died in 2009 at the age of 90, and drawings and copperplate engravings by the Leipzig-based draughtsman Christian Weihrauch (*1966).
Weihrauch devotes himself entirely to capturing small to minute objects in his everyday world and, in his most recent sheets, to depicting plants and trees. Küpper has created a comprehensive life's work of mostly non-representational tangles of lines and signs.
Anyone who gets involved in seeing together can experience the dissolution of the meaning of the distinction between abstract and representational image-making.
Time seems to play no role in the work of either artist. Only the chosen paper space and the inner urge to fill it with meaning determine the duration and intensity of their artistic work. Both artists are interested in the lines as well as in the sensitive interplay of colours.
For the first time, we are showing a special group of representational drawings by Küpper that depict heads. Sometimes it is a single head, sometimes a sheet-filling multitude of heads or entire artist's books full of heads. The question of whether they are portraits, self-portraits or fantasy figures remains unanswered. They are shown in the exhibition together with the figurative scenic copperplate engravings "Parade" and "The Hiding Place" by Weihrauch.
An extensive body of works by Heinrich Küpper is part of the collection of the Museum Kolumba in Cologne, Germany, and is regularly exhibited there. Christian Weihrauch has most recently exhibited in Germany at the Hallesche Kunstverein and the Kunstverein Rostock.