In the 10 rooms of the Kunstmuseum all important groups of works by Markus Weggenmann are presented. Starting with the earliest works, the "Bagatelles" from the 1970s and 1980s, which were created in addition to his work as an occupational therapist at the time, the tour focuses on the "Striped Pictures", the "Boulevards", the high-gloss "Car Paint Pictures", the gouaches and the highly pigmented glue color pictures, which have been created since the 2010s, and which are specially staged for the special architecture of the museum. The tour will end with a large-format mural painting created for the site.
The artist, who early on was counted among the circle of "radical painting", has been defining a color painting since the 1980s that - fortunately - cannot be assigned to any of the current fashions or dogmas, nor to the great concepts of realism or abstraction. Trusting in the inherent laws and the variety of effects of "painted color", the artist concentrates on fundamental questions such as When does color become a picture? How can color create space and plasticity? Can color painting exist without an author?
Despite the wide range of the technical and aesthetic approach, a constant in Weggenmann's pictorial and color work can be observed - and the exhibition shows this impressively: Each of his works is not only an autonomous work of art, but also a massive, site-changing intervention in the respective space. This may be due to the semantic openness of the works, which open up the most heterogeneous associative spaces - but is much more directly a consequence of the extremely sensual presence of color phenomena that transcend any linguistic space, any verbal description.
The exhibition is curated by Roland Scotti in close collaboration with Markus Weggenmann.