Wieland Payer

AI generated: The image shows a wintry landscape with snow-covered trees and a valley view, in which a large, black rectangular surface is placed in the centre. The contrast between the natural scenery and the dark, geometric shape creates a striking visual element.

"New Year", 2016, pastel and charcoal on MDF, 160 × 250 cm | ©Wieland Payer

Wieland Payer's pictures show foliage, forest and starry sky, mountain and valley, rock, mist and water. Landscape, nature, romanticism - this is the chain of associations that the viewer reflexively reaches for in the face of the large-format works. But even at second glance, it becomes clear that something is not quite right, that the clichés of art appreciation quickly become skewed. With cold pictorial arrangements, cubist reflections on the water surfaces, unreal geometric light phenomena and abstract surfaces and forms between and above the shrubbery, Payer ensures that the chain of associations does not hold in the long term. And then there is the material: pastel chalk. The powdery structure of the lines, the transparency of superimposed layers, the translucent surface of the paper allude to the "small" form of the drawing, the hybrid nature of the pastel technique and the expansive formats once again lead to an association that is misleading: Painting.

Payer's pictures are something in between, they are not depictions of nature, but arrangements that deceive, that puzzle expectations, that contradict all experience and thus create the unpredictable. Payer takes whatever props he needs from nature and, as a brilliant draughtsman, he evokes an atmosphere of beautiful illusion, of dream, of overwhelming. And the viewer realises that he is not confronted with certain facts, but with a world of thought that must first be deciphered.

»Payer shifts the unambiguous pictorial sense, determined by the law of the image, into a strange ambiguity when he first invokes and then rejects the viewer's objective reading.«

— MICHAEL FRIDAY

Michael Freitag, director of the Lyonel Feininger Gallery Quedlinburg, spoke at the opening on Friday 16 September at 8 pm.

The Leonhardi-Museum Dresden showed pastels, lithographs, drawings and sculptural works by the artist. Payer created a series of 40 small-format mixed media works especially for the Leonhardi Museum's watercolour room.

A catalogue of Wieland Payer's exhibitions at the Feininger-Galerie Quedlinburg, the Angermuseum Erfurt, the Galerie Rothamel (Erfurt and Frankfurt/M.) and the Leonhardi-Museum Dresden has been published by Kerber-Verlag.

KI generiert: Das Bild zeigt einen minimalistischen Ausstellungsraum mit Kunstwerken an den Wänden und einem Hocker in der Mitte des Raumes. An den Wänden hängen mehrere Gemälde, und der Raum hat einen Holzfußboden sowie eine große, rechteckige Deckenbeleuchtung.

Biographical information
Wieland Payer, born in Erfurt in 1981, first studied architecture and then, from 2002, fine art at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2011 with the title "MA Fine Art". Payer lives and works in Dresden and Erfurt.

Catalogue

A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition.

Wieland Payer

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