Artists

Louis Wessendorff

Press release

Blütenlese is what Louis Wessendorff has named his first exhibition at SEXAUER. When reading texts about art – and not only those related to art – it is often helpful to approach their main terms etymologically. In the case of Greek words commonly used in German, this means, first of all, translating them into German. Often, we are familiar with a Greek loan word without knowing its original meaning. Catastrophe would be one such word. In Blütenlese, it’s reversed. The Greek term for Blütenlese (literally: blossom collecting) means anthology, in other words, a collection of texts. This brings us to an important feature of Wessendorff’s art.

There is something anthological about Wessendorff’s work. Though not always recognizable at first glance, due to the works relying primarily on painting, rarely featuring writing, the works still possess a lingustic, therefore communicative, level. Wessendorff works with symbols, pictograms, ideograms, and the most diverse forms of linguistic expression, without these forms of comunication being immediately recognizable as such. Less frequently, he uses words directly, occasionally utilizing letters from an alphabet he developed himself (see below). Lingustic communication takes place not only between images and viewers, but also between the images themselves. Mutual references between pictures create a meta-text that contributes to the understanding of each indivudal picture.

To be clear: Wessendorff’s pictures have no singular meaning that can be immediately understood. Despite his works’ figurative elements, they are too abstract, too coded, and too multilayered to be boxed into one interpetation. Yet the linguistic forms of expression through painting, coupled with unique painterly elements, form special spaces with a great potential for narrative associations. For this reason, texts inherent in these paintings have pertinence.