Desolate and romantic

The book on the occasion of Marcus Weber’s exhibition KRAZY DOG MOON KAT presents for the first time a wide selection of paintings by the ­artist, who was born in Stuttgart in 1965 and now lives in Berlin. They are narrative tongue-in-cheek images, allusive group portraits and urban land­scapes with grotesque re-wordings of social ­orders, and caricatured and exaggerated individual characters. There are flashes of painterly sophistication, so that some works may be read as a ­capriccio, desolate and romantic at the same time. Great painters seem to always resonate – Marcus Weber displays an unmistakable enthusiasm for ­artists such as James Ensor and Philip Guston.All in all, this creates a grotesque mixture mocking each and every hierarchy, based as much on ­productive bridging into the realm of comics by Georg Herriman as on art history. Weber is a genre painter in the best tradition who paints images of society. Unconventional communities are moved into focus – such as isolated men at bar counters, characters reading art magazines, certain types slouching in design furniture, and café house scenes where masked people gather together – but above all, ­delicate details receive the utmost ­attention, such as three scoops of ice cream or a piece of cake known as Donauwelle. As a subtle and multi-layered reaction to current political and social conditions, these works outrival so-called new history painting, which is usually exhausted by painted copies of press photos. Accordingly, the New York Times (May 2, 2018), on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in the United States, attested to the artist a surprisingly up-to-date ­approach in his emulating the immutability of real life.

Villa Merkel Galerien der Stadt Esslingen, 24/6 – 19/8/2018