|
Gert Wiedmaier
March 21st, 2008 Chicago Tribune, Friday March 28th, 2008
"Photo prints give urban landscape a soft focus"
A century ago, pioneers of modern photography were engaged in a struggle to free the medium from the look of lithographs and paintings. Now, however, after more than 50 years of freedom, artists have re-embraced soft focus and handwork on photographic prints among much else, turning what used to be anathema into contemporary virtue.
Gert Wiedmaier, a native of Stuttgart, Germany, whose first solo exhibition in Chicago is at Thomas Masters Gallery, is a painter in his late 40s. Three pieces on view indicate an intent to revitalize abstract geometric painting. But majority of works in the exhibition are based in photography and a technic of overpainting with wax that would not been amiss in the heyday of Pictorialism.
Wiemaier's subject is Chicago, which he sees freshly and without sentimentality. so the coldness with which he approaches the urban landscape and its people keeps his handwork from suggesting the haze of nostalgia. If to anything, his pictures with people draw close to those by Michal Rovner that emphasize existential anonymity. However, architecture is more Wiedmaier's thing, and some of his many doctored images the size of postcard present views of our city that will make it seem unfamiliar to even those who live here. Alan Artner
New City, March 27, 2008
Wiedmaier, "Chicago Observations", photography. in a thoroughly postmodern take on pictorialist photography, which adopts the softly focused aesthetic of impressionism, German photo-artist Gert Wiedmaier has turned his lens on our sweet home, glued his prints to wooden plaques, applied color to the images here and there and-for the culmination of his process art- brushed endless coats of wax on them and final topping of varnish, producing a smooth and seamless city bathed in muted blue-green, yellowish-brown and brownish-gray haze. Wiedmaier is at his best when he shoots knots of people from above, depersonalizing them and blotting out their surrounding so that they seem to be suspended in a beautiful fog of alienation. Having subverted the mordantly precise modernist shots of lonely crowds from seventy years ago, Wiedmaier shows us masses who have passed through Jimi Hendrix"s purple haze, and we are content that there is no exit for them. Michael Weinstein |
![](images/white.gif" width=){kind=small}
