Günter Weseler & Wirtschaftswunder

OPENING | 26 October 2022
from 5 pm to 7.30 pm
27 October 2022 – 28 February 2023

Galleria Allegra Ravizza is pleased to present Günter Weseler & Wirtschaftwunder, a personal exhibition about the artist Günter Weseler (1930-2020), which will open on Wednesday October 26th at the Lugano venue in Piazza Cioccaro 7.

The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Archiv Günter Weseler, aims to tell Weseler’s artistic path by analyzing not only his drawings, paintings, musical-mathematical-astrological research and his sculptures of “organic kinetics”, but also by focusing on the historical and cultural context in which the artist conducted and developed his multi-faceted intellectual and formal research.

Innovator among the innovators and free man among the freemen, he has been one of the great protagonists of one of the most significant moments for the European change of the arts in the twentieth century.

Weseler, in fact, belonged to the elite of Rhineland artists – which included, among others, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, Günther Uecker and Jörg Immendorff and articipated with his ruffled Atemobjekt in the legendary exhibitions of the time, such as “Düsseldorfer Szene” at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne in 1969 and “Strategy: Get Arts” at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1970.

During the 1960s, West Germany was undergoing that historical period known as the Wirtschaftswunder“, a decade of rapid industrial growth and economic development following the Second World War.

In these years of expansion and growth, Düsseldorf became an important cultural center in the European art scene, also thanks to its famous and renowned Academy of Fine Arts which attracted hundreds of students and independent artists from all over Europe. This allowed, and still allows today, to create a network of international contacts which benefited the entire city.

The collective spirit of expressive freedom and the drive to experiment of what is now called the “Düsseldorf scene” was not only breathed in the institutional art environments, but it took over streets, pubs and the most independent galleries and associations as well. It was precisely this fervor that made simple young artists and ordinary academia students the pillars of the pivotal change in the art of the second half of the twentieth century.

In this scenario where new energies and desire to experiment were throbbing, Günter Weseler established his own atelier, where he embarked on his artistic experience and empirical research. Combining art and life, philosophy and science, emotionality and self-control, the artist developed a path of analysis focused on rhythm and breathing, combining painting and music.
From these pictorial compositions (or acoustic paintings) on paper and masonite derive his organic kinetics works: the Atemobjekt, furry ruffled objects that breathe. With meticulous precision, Weseler transcribes movement diagrams on Cartesian coordinates while adapting to these systems small motors that determine the breathing rhythms of his works, his “organic lives”.

“Weseler represents in a certain way the German variant of kinetics, which is not satisfied with being a hymn to the machine as for Tinguely; at the same time, he does not like the complicated sophistication of Schoeffer’s kinetic lighting. His kinetics, organic and animal, approach meditation; he knows the vulnerability of life, its transience, the existence of invisible beings, the disturbing; but he also knows the joke, the din, the grotesque. It is an artificially created human comedy, with all the follies of ‘humanity’ today“. (H. Meister)

Galleria Allegra Ravizza
Piazza Cioccaro 7 – primo piano
6900 Lugano, Svizzera
Tel: +41 0(91) 2243187
Monday to Friday from 11 pm to 6 pm
Saturday by appointment
art@allegraravizza.com
www.allegraravizza.com