Artists

Bernhard Walter

Press release

The Sculptures and the Images Behind the Images In his current exhibition “alles gerade todo recto,” Bernhard Walter analytically combines sculpture, relief, painting, and photography: it is both the combination of these artistic media and the developed visual language—with all its rich allusions—that brings Walter’s decisive thinking and action into sharp focus. Thus, the viewer is confronted with heavy, rounded beechwood drums, in the center of which are embedded nearly square openings. While the voluminous forms occupy space on the one hand, the openings allow space to flow in and out on the other, thereby making it a significant component of the works in two distinct ways. The grain also lends the wood a rich, painterly texture in a natural way, revealing the painter Walter’s subtle sensibility. In the post-minimalist tradition, however, the visible is more than what appears materially: an allusion to a cartwheel emerges, which, however, seems to evoke not a smooth, but rather an uneasy, bumpy, halting rolling or forward movement. The photographs on display, as well as the twisted clay horse legs, further reveal Walter—within the context of his diverse body of work—as an artist who knows how to transform mimetic foundations—in this case, a horse’s body—into an autonomous pictorial or artistic form that deliberately transforms the mimetic, endowing it with a new and distinct quality through art. Yet what becomes apparent in the works on display is rather the process of becoming and passing away. Perhaps this can be understood as a reference to the artistic creative process.

Furthermore, the symbolism of the horse in art also evokes the theme of humanity’s sovereign mastery over a force that is, in essence, unbridled, as exemplified, for instance, in Donatello’s famous Renaissance equestrian statue of “Gattamelata” in Padua. Nearly 500 years later, Marino Marini creates a counter-image to this—in which the supposedly stable claims to power and dominion are transformed into a precarious, unstable equilibrium—and indeed, even into a reversal of those very claims—in his “Miracolo” series of horse-and-rider constellations. Walter is intimately familiar with these precursors In addition to the three-dimensional and photographic works, the current exhibition also features reliefs and paintings. The former are crafted from old window frames and transformed into a delicate interplay of smooth, flattened, concave, and convex elements. Rudimentary accents of color, combined with the signs of aging on the once-painted wood, enhance the extremely subtle character of the reliefs. But here, too, Walter does not allow the viewer to dwell exclusively on the delicate, raw beauty of the works.

For on display are crosses whose symbolic content is inextricably linked to the sensitive spatial creations, whereby these, too, in their pictorial form, open up more than just one level of meaning. The paintings, formally austere and seemingly constructivist, reveal, upon closer inspection, certain breaks that constitute their particular appeal, as they demonstrate just how much Walter is always, above all, a painter capable of imbuing even the most extreme formal reductions with great aesthetic power: Thus, upon closer inspection, the black transforms into a light-filled blue, and the surfaces of some paintings reveal themselves as impasto-like masses of color that transcend the austerity of the external pictorial form without shattering it. But here, too, the following applies: Those who, upon seeing these works, are reminded of Malevich’s pieces for the “Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10” held in 1915 can continue to reflect on utopias and their failure, as well as the images behind the images. Or, in the spirit of the exhibition title chosen by Walter, “alles gerade todo recto,” uncover the reverse side of the supposedly straight.

– Guido Reuter