Michael Weißköppel

July 25, 2019
at 5:43 pm
# abstract, art, contemporary, graffiti, painting

The German post-digital artist Michael Weißköppel links digital processes and incorporates them into his highly charged works. The rapid spray-painted marks and erasures, common to his work, smash up against formal landscapes, which from a distance feel photographic. And in addition, his manner of painting the landscapes hints at abstraction and the urgency of 21st-century culture.

As a painter, Michael Weißköppel employs a somewhat cautious, or, in other words, even skeptical gaze. Deliberately avoiding the historical traditions of figurative richness, he prefers working with the flat application of pastel acrylics. More than that, even though perspective lines in his works suggest a kind of orientation, they yet lead nowhere. Similarly, blank spaces that Weißköppel is fascinated by, do not intend to indicate anything specific but rather question the act of painting pictures. Because of that sometimes it seems as if the underlying message in many of his recent works can be read as ‘what takes shape can easily disappear again.’

By erasing, overpainting, and over-spraying parts of his works, Michael Weißköppel applies gestures that undermine the idea of a finished work of art. This way he conveys messages which outlive their time. And despite often appearing cool and unexcited, his interventions in the painting’s materials and unusual experiments with presentation are radical. In fact, he addresses the question of how to approach the production of pictures with contemporary means.

Weißköppel clearly demonstrates the functioning of painting and highlights the fact that his paintings are carefully produced. The images that he creates, frame reality and keep trying to cross the inevitable boundaries of the canvas. Meanwhile, the viewers become something like sparring partners who deliberately face up to the disruptions caused by the artist.

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