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.«
At the opening on Friday 16 September at 8 pm, Michael Freitag, Director of the Lyonel Feininger Gallery in Quedlinburg, gave a speech.
The Leonhardi Museum in Dresden exhibited pastels, lithographs, drawings and sculptural works by the artist. Payer created a series of 40 small-format mixed-media works especially for the watercolour room at the Leonhardi Museum.
Kerber Verlag has published a catalogue accompanying Wieland Payer’s exhibitions at the Feininger Gallery in Quedlinburg, the Angermuseum in Erfurt, the Rothamel Gallery (Erfurt and Frankfurt am Main) and the Leonhardi Museum in Dresden.
