Peer Gessing

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The artist Peer Gessing at the performance Corrida , Nimes, France, 1999

Peer Gessing (* 1967 in Berlin-Zehlendorf ) is a German painter and artist. His work includes painting , objects , installations and performances . The technique of overpainting, the serial motif of the face, vehicle alienation and defunctionalism are characteristic of his work. Peer Gessing has lived and worked in Baden-Baden at the RWG public high school since 2010 . He teaches art and German.

Life

Gessing grew up in Biberach an der Riss . Since 1986 he has been painting over books. From 1988 to 1993 he studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart . From 1993 to 1994 he was a project assistant for interdisciplinary design at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart . From 1996 to 2004 he worked in the Marienhöhe studio in North Baden. From 2006 to 2010 he was in The Hague at the DiSDH. He has lived in Baden-Baden since 2010. He is a teacher at Richard Wagner Gymnasium. Peer Gessing teaches fine arts and German.

plant

Overpainting as an "aesthetic intervention"

The central element in Peer Gessing's artistic work is the overpainting, which can be traced back to the beginnings of his work. The artist himself gives the line - not without irony - strikingly: "Stage 1 becomes stage 2. Overpainting means: current content, highly qualified substrates, special emphasis, a state of suspension between destruction and preservation - approx. 40% of the overpainted surface remains visible" .

So the aim is not to completely cover the original, but to superimpose and alienate it. Gessing himself speaks of an “aesthetic intervention”, which is always to be understood as painting. The result is a threefold painterly abolition of what already exists in the dialectical sense: “Abolition as annulment or destruction; Repeal as preservation; Abolition as lifting to a higher level ” . With the practice of overpainting, Peer Gessing sees himself equally in line with traditional cultural techniques - keywords palimpsest , pentimenti - as well as at the height of the most modern processes of our time - keywords sampling , bastard pop .

He uses magazines ( Bild der Wissenschaft , 1986), books ( Europaprojekt , 1998) and advertisements ( Chanel Egoïste ) as underground , but also three-dimensional objects such as televisions, furniture, US dollars, an engine block or cars. At the center of his artistic interest, however, is the examination of the visual work of other artists. Peer Gessing not only renews reproductions ( Beckmann ), but also, as a highlight, originals from art history of the 19th and 20th centuries (Emil Firnrohr, Josef Weber, Gustav Holweg ) or contemporary colleagues ( Johannes Hüppi , Thaddäus Hüppi , Reiner Stolz, Sebastian Rogler, Dirk Klomann, Peter Nowak and many others).

Facing the future

Another distinguishing feature in Peer Gessing's oeuvre is the motif of the face, the representation of which, individually or combined into fields, is legion in his works, the viewer meets it again and again with a friendly smile. Built from powerful, street artesque , broad brushstrokes, Gessing only constructs his faces from a striking outline, as well as eyes, nose and mouth - the ears and eyebrows are only hinted at. They look similar to one another, but have an individual expression that distinguishes them from one another.

Who do these faces represent? In contrast to classic portrait painting , Gessing is neither concerned with the recognizability of a particular person nor with their representative representation. Perhaps they can be read with Sortirios Michou as failed self-portraits : “You made the discovery that the self-portraits always become the others. That is the whole story of the self-portrait ” .

Another approach is the performative, serial use of the motif: “What does a single head that smiles have to do with a performance? Less than many heads, because the legibility arises from the series character of Peer Gessing's pictures ” . Gessing himself underlines this when he says: “The repetition of the head shape always follows the same rhythm. The goal and result is the simple and direct liveliness, which makes the painted picture a counterpart ” .

In fact, Gessing's faces are direct, concrete, often frontal, at the same time they elude the viewer through the depersonalization and anonymity of their features. In 1998, two years before the dot-com bubble burst and six years before Facebook was founded, Sortirios Michou said of Gessing: “Peer Gessing is obviously aiming for personal networking as a virtual reality. Who, besides his or her minds, populates this world remains open ” . Today, Gessings Faces can be read as anonymous placeholders, androgynous stereotypes of an atomized and fully networked mass society in which the face is just as omnipresent as the loss of face. With an ambiguous smile that is as meaningful as it is meaningless, Gessing's faces leave the viewer puzzling.

Defunctionalism and vehicle alienation

Peer Gessing: Luxery car , Performance, Weehauken, NJ, USA, 1999 (Skyline New York)

In addition to the overpainting and the serial use of the face, the concept of defunctionalism is the third important pillar with which Peer Gessing temporarily stripped objects, especially cars , of their function by means of artistic intervention and thus transformed them into hybrid beings between machine (the car) and man (art) transferred and at the same time deconstructed. In keeping with this dual nature, for Peer Gessing the alienated car is a modern centaur , that mythical creature from Greek myth, half man, half horse.

With his artistic intervention, Gessing reveals the object beyond its function: What is a car without the ability to drive it? A pile of junk? Pure form and pure material? From here, however, you can also look back at the function that has been suspended: Does the car really only have the function of driving? Isn't it also a means of longing, a status symbol or, as the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk puts it, “intoxication and regression” , “rolling uterus” and “platonic private cave” ?

Postmodern

Not only Gessing's deconstructivist concept of defunctionalism can be located in the area of postmodernism . Rather, Gessing's concept of overpainting, superimposing and alienation also picks up on a central postmodern theme. With Jean-François Lyotard , the ancestor of postmodernism, Gessing persistently and uncomfortably raises the question of the truth and its conditions: “How do you prove the evidence? Or more generally: Who decides on the conditions of truth? " .

By intervening in originals from art history or contemporary artist colleagues, Peer Gessing throws this question with all his might towards the art viewer, art collector, the art business and its protagonists, who as a whole decide on the question of what art is. From Gessing's overpainting, Lyotard seems to intone: “What seems certain, however, is that in both cases the delegitimization and the primacy of performativity of the professor's era ring the grave bells: He is no more competent to convey established knowledge than the networks of storage and he is no more competent at inventing new moves or new games than the interdisciplinary research teams ” .

Neo-romanticism

Ultimately, an important factor in understanding Gessing's work is its romantic impetus. Peer Gessing wants to be the hero of his own narrative art history.

How differently can his hypertrophic, hyperactive productivity be explained, his insatiable hunger for painterly models, with which he takes possession of reality and puts his own stamp on it in the form of Gessing's face. For Gessing, art is a place of longing and escape.

Just as the eponymous hero Fitzcarraldo alias Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog 's film of the same name is obsessed with the idea of ​​building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle, Peer Gessing is obsessed with his artistic work, even intoxicated. To paraphrase Sotirios Michou , who framed a picture of the river steamer from Fitzcarraldo stranded in the jungle with the subtitle Art and Exit and the only professor whose pupil Peer Gessing would like to be: “The language of the overlay is with an odyssey to compare, the aim of which should be a forgotten knowledge. The heads become heroes who have not yet reached the end of their journey ” .

Working in public collections

Solo and group exhibitions (selection)

Studio scene with a St. Petersburg hanging, 2014
  • 1994 Mountains of books and portraits, Künstlerhaus Ulm
  • 1995 Dialog, Gaildorf Castle and Church, Braith-Mali-Museum, Biberach an der Riss
  • 1997 Limes project - 2,500 painted heads (catalog)
  • 1998 "Europe Project", Spiegel printing company, Ulm (catalog)
  • 1999 "Luxury car", Clinton / Weehauken, NJ, USA
  • 1999 "Machine Man", Museo Coahuila, Mexico (catalog)
  • 2000 "Kentaur", Audience Award, Toyamura Biennale, Japan
  • 2003 "1/2/3", Forum for Art (painting-installation)
  • 2006 work with students, Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam
  • 2006–2009 actions in Tallinn, Brussels, London, Mexico
  • 2009 Cybercity, Office NIEUW CENTRAAL, The Hague
  • 2011 Gallery Knecht and Burster, Karlsruhe with Reiner Stolz & Thaddäus Hüppi, [1]
  • 2012 The Hamburg Collection, SHOW-ROOM Baden-Baden
  • 2013 Main thing, Forum for Art, Heidelberg
  • 2013 Equipage Meets Art, Kurhaus / Casino Baden-Baden
  • 2013 Artists in Love, Akademie Weißensee, Berlin
  • 2013 Art-Hotel, Allee Hotel Leidinger, Baden-Baden
  • 2014 "Seafarers in Love & Laughing Artists", Port Museum Rotterdam
  • 2014 FACE TO FACE, Society of Friends of Young Art Baden-Baden , [2]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peer Gessing in: "Gessing: Interventionen", p. 9 (catalog, 2000)
  2. ↑ Roger Behrens in: Critical Theory, pp. 51f. (Hamburg, 2002)
  3. ↑ Sortirios Michou in: "Gessing: About Art", p. 14 (catalog, 2000)
  4. ↑ Kasimir Dorn in: "Limes Project", p. 19 (catalog, 2000)
  5. ↑ Peer Gessing in: "Gessing: About Art", p. 7 (catalog, 2000)
  6. ↑ Sortirios Michou in: "Limes Project", p. 24 (catalog, 2000)
  7. ^ Herder Lexicon, Greek and Roman Mythology, keyword "Centaurs", p. 115 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 2003).
  8. ↑ Peter Sloterdijk in: "Rolling Uterus", Spiegel No. 8/1995, p. 130
  9. ↑ Jean-François Lyotard in: The postmodern knowledge: A report, p. 91f. (Vienna, 3rd edition 1994)
  10. ↑ Jean-François Lyotard in: The postmodern knowledge: A report, p. 156. (Vienna, 3rd edition 1994)
  11. ↑ Sortirios Michou in: "Limes Project", p. 24 (catalog, 2000)
personal data
SURNAME Gessing, peer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Zehlendorf