Via Lewandowsky

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Volker Via Lewandowsky (born May 7, 1963 in Dresden ) is a German artist. He works with installation , sculpture , object art , photography , performance , painting and drawing .

Life

From 1982 to 1987 Lewandowsky studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts . Between 1985 and 1989 he organized subversive performances there with the avant-garde group of the "Autoperforationartists", which undermined the official art scene of the GDR. In 1989 he left the GDR shortly before the fall of the Wall and moved to West Berlin . He travels a lot and has had various long stays abroad and the like. a. in New York, Rome, Beijing and Canada. He lives in Berlin.

plant

Lewandowsky works with changing artistic media. Best known are his sculptural-installation works and his exhibition scenographies with architectural influences (e.g. “Brain and Thinking: Cosmos in the Head”, German Hygiene Museum Dresden, 2000). Since the 1990s he has been integrating sound art elements into his work again and again; this sound artistic aspect is given increasing importance in later works, often in combination with performative borrowings.

Lewandowsky's focus is not on a fixed artistic form, but on a substantive basis that bundles the diversity of the visual appearance of the works. In this way, leitmotifs can be crystallized that shape his work. The misunderstanding as the failure of communication, as the deconstruction and reshaping of meaning is one of them, the processual another. The artist is not looking for the finished, the end, not for the complete destruction, but for the constructive moment within a (destruction) process. This applies in particular to the satire and the anti-pathos in Lewandowsky's works, which do not want to be disrespectful, but rather meet the original object with admiration and amazement.

His way of working and the effect of the artistic results are mostly characterized by opposites. Controlled, staged and permanently appearing elements contain the intrusion of the spontaneous, unexpected, instantaneous and thus also of the living. At second glance, humorous, light-looking works contain cruel, brutal moments that freeze the viewer's laughter.

His predilection for the tragic-comic, the absurd and paradox as well as the Sisyphosian motif of constant repetition and futility of action connect Via Lewandowsky's art with Dadaism , Surrealism and Fluxus . The ironic breaking of the everyday, the intrusion of the foreign into the familiar, mostly domestic, area takes place partly with the use of insignia of the German bourgeoisie (such as cuckoo clock, hardware store garden shed, budgie or bureaucracy).

His interest in the construction of national identities reveals a political dimension within his oeuvre. The works in public space prove this as well as his performances, which create an awareness of the structures of historiography. In 2009, his contribution to the 20th anniversary of the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig consisted of a “confetti parade”. Using a cannon, the celebrants were shot at with confetti, which consisted of small business cards on which the aliases and professions of ten thousand anonymous Stasi domestic spies were found, which were taken from the documents of the Stasi records authority in the administrative district of Leipzig .

Working in public space

Red Carpet, 2003, carpet, hand-tufted, 5 m × 10 m

Via Lewandowsky's works in public space, however, are not reduced to an obviously political aspect; they too reveal a wide range. "Von hinter" (2006) plays with absurdity and a puzzle of form and content. The work is in the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, USA. As in many works by Via Lewandowsky, the title doubles the ambiguity inherent in the work as well as the echoing bigotry and thus reinforces the effect.

The work “Red Carpet” is a work at a central location in German history in Berlin. In the entrance area of ​​the Bendler block , an oversized carpet is laid out, which only shows the war-torn Berlin from a bird's eye view and ironically takes up the concept of the bomb carpet. This irony is enhanced by the choice of location, since the Bendlerblock is now the second seat of the Federal Minister of Defense . The superimposition of different levels of understanding and the deliberate misdirection through the interpretation of ambiguous narrative strands not only characterize this work, but are generally characteristic of Via Lewandowsky's work.

Scholarships and awards (selection)

Sources and web links