Raymond-Émile Waydelich

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Raymond-Émile Waydelich (* 1938 in Strasbourg ) is a French - Alsatian painter , sculptor and action artist. He lives and works in Hindisheim / Alsace.

Life

Raymond Waydelich was born in Strasbourg in 1938 as the son of the craftsman ( Ebenist ) Marcel Waydelich and his wife Frieda Schneider. At the age of fourteen he received his first training as a sculptor in his father's workshop, but a year later, on the recommendation of his teacher Louis Fritsch, he was allowed to attend the Académie des Arts decoratifs in Strasbourg. After four years he graduated with a diploma and was awarded the Grand Prize of the City of Strasbourg. He completed a second degree at the Arts Déco in Paris after two years, also with a diploma.

In 1959 he was drafted as a conscript and was employed as an army photographer for 18 months during the Algerian war . In 1961 he made his first photo report about Roman sites in Algeria. In 1962 he returned to Strasbourg and initially worked there as a decorator. In the early 1970s he traveled to the Maghreb , visited the archaeological sites in Tabarka , Greece and Turkey, where he visited Ephesus , Aphrodisias , Miletus and Hierapolis . Back in Strasbourg, he rummaged in flea markets for all sorts of everyday objects that were integrated into his assemblages as objets trouvés , which he later referred to as the "archeology of the future".

In an attic he discovered notes by the Strasbourg seamstress Lydia Jacob (* 1876), who was to accompany and shape his artistic work as an imagined person and muse. He invented a résumé for her and began the artistic engagement with his muse with the Lydia Jacob cycle (from 1973). In 1978 his work "L'Homme de Frédehof, 2720 après JC", which he dedicated to Lydia Jacob, was shown in the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale . In 1986 the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Mulhouse presented the "Lydia Jacob Story" and in the same year the Center National des Arts Plastiques organized a fictitious "reconstruction" of her life with the help of everyday objects from her lifetime under the title Rencontre avec Lydia Jacob he had found in his collecting drives. This reconstruction of a historical person and their real everyday life led him to the idea, "... to look at his own time, even an as yet unforeseen future from the perspective of a retrospective reconstruction." With his work Caveau pour le Futur, 3790 après Jésu Christe , Waydelich was then represented at the 10th Documenta in Kassel, as the first Alsatian since Hans Arp , as Waydelich writes in an autobiographical sketch.

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Waydelich: car scrap archeology , underground car park at Augustinerplatz in Freiburg

Waydelich's extensive oeuvre includes paintings, sculptures and sculptures made of ceramic or bronze, assemblages , works on paper, as well as public art events and performances . The artistic techniques of his colorful, playful, funny-bizarre graphics range from drawing, watercolor, lithography, etching, monotype to overpainting found paper objects.

He is one of the most famous living artists in France. His works are in numerous public and private collections around the world. His watercolor collages have become particularly famous , showing real living beings (crocodile, cat, pig) alienated in a ghostly manner within landscapes that the artist painted on ancient letters, some of which he acquired while traveling (e.g. to Crete) . His style, which often takes up perspectives, motifs and elements from prehistoric cave paintings or Greek mythology, approaches fantastic realism. Representations of mythical creatures, but also icons of modernity, such as John Wayne, serve to illustrate a “mythology of modernity” which, from the artist's point of view, is ultimately intended to anticipate an “archeology of the future”. The central figure of this approach is the Strasbourg milliner Lydia Jacob, whose notes he discovered by chance and around whom his artistic oeuvre revolves from then on. He invented a résumé for a woman who becomes his imaginary muse and fictional co-author.

Waydelich occasionally signs with RE Waydelich, Marchand de Bonheur et Archéologue du Futur .

Works and projects (selection)

  • 1961 Photo report about the Roman archaeological sites in Algeria.
  • L´Homme de Frédehof , Venice Biennale
  • 1995 Mutarotnegra - 3790 years AD , excavation project at Strasbourg Cathedral.
Raymond Waydelich, Mutarotnegra: 3790 après Jésus-Christ. Ouvrage réalisé à l'occasion de l'exposition de Raymond E. Waydelich "Mutarotnegra. 3790 après Jésus-Christ", inaugurée Musée Archéologique de Strasbourg. With Pierre Pflimlin ; Tomi Ungerer ; Claude Rossignol; Bernadette Schnitzler; Germain Muller . Strasbourg La Nuée Bleue 1995, ISBN 2-7165-0325-7 .
  • 1997 Memoria -3790 AD . Action at Documenta X in Kassel
  • Lydia Jacob Story . 55 mixed media collages. Card series.

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1976 Osthaus Museum Hagen , Hagen
  • 1978 Biennale di Venezia , French Pavilion, Venice
  • 1979 Forum Kunst Rottweil, Rottweil
  • 1981 "3500 AD", Musée Archéologique , Strasbourg
  • 1985 Muséo de Arte Moderno Emilio Caraffa, Cordoba, Argentina
  • 1986 Musée des Beaux Arts, Mulhouse
  • 1986 Center National d'Arts Plastiques, Paris
  • 1988 Lund Art Gallery, Sweden
  • 1990 Gallery in the town hall, Kehl
  • 1997 Museum for Sepulchral Culture , Kassel,
  • 1998 Center d´Art Contemporain André Malraux, Colmar
  • 1998 Art Association Offenburg
  • 1999 Center Européen d´Action Artistique Contemporaine, Strasbourg
  • 1999 Esslingen Art Association, Villa Merkel

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ quoted from: Cornelie Becker-Lamers, 2009.
  2. ↑ [1]
  3. ↑ German = merchant of luck and archaeologist of the future.
  4. ↑ = Argentoratum , Roman name for the city of Strasbourg, read backwards

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Waydelich, Raymond-Émile
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French-Alsatian painter and sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Strasbourg