Karl Witti

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Karl Witti (* 1947 in Miesbach , Upper Bavaria ) is a German draftsman, art and theater painter and an important representative of utopian realism.

biography

Karl Witti studied from 1967 to 1972 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and then became a drawing teacher at the vocational school for wood sculptors and carvers in Oberammergau . After a short time he quit the civil servant position and has since worked as a freelance artist and theater painter, among others. a. for the Volkstheater München, Residenztheater München, the Münchener Kammerspiele and the ZDF. In 1990, 2000 and 2010 Karl Witti directed the stage painting for the Oberammergau Passion Play , in 2000 in collaboration with Alfons Ostermeier and Hans Reindl (stage design: Stefan Hageneier).

In his series of drawings, Witti addresses the utopian unity of man and nature, a post-industrial Arcadia in the context of political and social issues, of the destruction of nature and climate change, which are reminiscent of the imaginations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry David Thoreau . Further work cycles, influenced by Franz Kafka and Günter Eich , interpret historical topics and personalities from an alienated time perspective. The pictures tell "stories" which often correlate with a poetic picture inscription and give the drawings a romantic accord. The background motif is the gentle, silent recapture of inhabited sites by the forces of the vegetation. Witti constructs a fictional future in which our civilization is only a distant memory and the timeless order of nature is restored. A mythical level of meaning is laid over the objects in the picture: birds, for example, are always messengers of freedom and highways are symbols of the present. His symbolic landscapes are characterized by intensive research on nomadic ethnic groups and threatened peoples who live with nature without wanting to take possession of it, and studies of nature in the Pflaumdorfer Moos at his place of residence in Eresing. Over the years, a complex canon of images has emerged that reflects the spirit of contradiction and the search for meaning of his generation.

Work process

“The partly photo-realistic works are drawn with a slightly circulating pencil. Countless rotations result in the first “imprint” of the image, which can be compared to an overexposed photograph. In further work steps, the surfaces are compacted until a scale of sublime gradations from deep black to delicate gray tones is created. The focus is not on the formal, but on the formulated. In more recent works, Witti increasingly uses color ”.

Series of works

  • Tree pictures
  • Tree poems
  • Transformations
  • The return of the great forests
  • A letter from Samarkand
  • Mr. Matthias Kneißl is going to America
  • Ularuasia
  • Counterworlds - a journey through time to youth
  • Otherworld

Public collections

New City Museum Landsberg am Lech

Exhibitions

Exhibitions and a. in Munich (art salon, art pavilion), Landsberg am Lech (city museum), Augsburg (Great Swabian art exhibition, Abraxas).

Awards

literature

  • Christian Burchard: Karl Witti - New Myths. Work introduction and annotated catalog raisonné 1963–2015 , eos, St. Ottilien 2015 (264 pages), ISBN 978-3-8306-7747-5 .
  • Hartfrid Neunzert (Ed.): Karl Witti. Opposite worlds. Catalog for the exhibition of the same name in the New City Museum Landsberg am Lech, Art History Series from Landsberg am Lech No. 36/2007, ISSN  0931-2722
  • Christian Burchard: How the sky for Oberammergau is created , in: AVISO. Journal for Science and Art in Bavaria, Issue 3/2010, pp. 40–43.
  • Claus-Peter Lieckfeld: Narrative Pictures. Karl Witti - a magical realist from Upper Bavaria , MAGDA. The authors' magazine, http://www.magda.de/erzaehlbilder/

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Christian Burchard: Karl Witti - New Myths. Work introduction and annotated catalog raisonné . St. Ottilien 2015, p. 19 .
  2. ↑ Cf. Christian Burchard: Karl Witti - New Myths. Work introduction and annotated catalog raisonné. St. Ottilien 2015, p. 13.
  3. ↑ Minka Ruile: The drawing sculptor . In: Landsberger Tagblatt . April 16, 2018 ( landkreis-landsberg.de [accessed March 22, 2020]).
personal data
SURNAME Witti, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, graphic artist and stage painter
DATE OF BIRTH 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Miesbach