Without Title, study on magazine paper, ca. 2010
Woolen figurines of Pagliaccio, from Irmela Wittebergs paraphernalia
The artist on Lanzarote, ca.1985
The artistic work of Irmela occupies a peculiar place in the range of expressions. Digital work in general is inseparable from a certain technological tinge, at times bordering into a polular dimension. Yet for her, this workflow symbolized the liberation of the artistic individual from working with solid and tangible concepts at all. Her computer becomes an oracle of the subconscious, not bound anymore by drawing media or substance.
This commitment paved the way for an iterative process, which ultimately transcended the concept of a finished picture. Consequently, her work bears closer resemblance to picture stories, her sequences of accidental shapes and strictly formalized faces weaving a narrative mirroring a stream of consciousness. The entire workflow becomes art. Specifically that means, that she created multiple variants of a given motife. Some of them are only subtly distinguished and in their sum draw ever closer to the essence of her quite clearly established prior vision. The free grouping and new contets into which she mixed her figures, used like printing blocks were guided by free association.
The differentiated colour gradients are a key element of the specifically digital environment in contrast to traditional art. As a touchstone and last consequence of the maximum activation of picture planes, she worked with strongly striated spectral gradations to markedly visualize the highly energetic tensions within the picture. The repeated application of this technique to smaller cells of the motif dissolves formerly coherent masses to endlessly new variations entirely.
The distortion, modulation and unexpected metamorphosis develop this premise into an extensive return to the formal logic of a dream, which is depicted with very specific properties as a statement to its supposed nature. Painstakingly rendered naturalistic details and anatomy clashes with the surreal logic of wavy lines calculated towards the negative space. Wildly differing levels of detail throughout mislead the viewer as to which level of perception one occupies. The disorientation and profound lack of clarity pushes one into Irmela Wittebergs surreal world view.
Due to the consequent elimination of perspective in favour of interlocking forms, covering nearly the entire image space in a staggered arrangement, she attained a fundamental logic of the space very close to the compositional plans of Byzantine and Chinese decoration of walls. Her pictures are staffages or dioramas for the puppetry of dreams. Due to her palettes of primary colours, her graphics have some superficial similarities to formalist fabric design and commercial art either, while her contents change between irony and melancholy on very short notice.
The work is centered around figures - smiling, dancing or chatting with big innocent eyes. Her faces speak of cheerfulness, of melancholy and mockery. The art of Irmela Witteberg contains many ties to the characteristic roles and masks of the italian Commedia dell’arte, a well-regarded repertory of exaggerated character traits and spiteful jests. One particualarly universal example is Arlecchino, the cunning yet greedy servant with a signature black mask and predecessor to modern harlequins and clowns. This is the starting point and focus of Irmela Wittebergs endeavours and especially crystallizes in a series of pictures outright referencing said subject matter. Formally portraits of surreal anatomy, the jolly figures are filtered through endless iterations. A picture was never finished, distilled by constantly flaring up work phases until approaching a distant hypothetical, idealistic imagination of the subject, ever branching out into compositions of equal worth.
Like in the Commedia, the artist chose not to represent individual characters but rather idealized types of dream figures, distilling the manifold nature of her own experiences. The same scathing criticism permeates the surface of exaggerated cheerfulness. Not even symbols or metaphors could convey the effect she was searching for. Instead defamiliarization is the primary method to visualize sequences of inner movements. Character traits are not conveyed through facial expression or action, instead relying on a distinctly surreal physique. Inner processes are directly translated into a language of comical anatomy. A central thred in this endeavour is the unusual morphology of the eyes, which are often adorned with multiple eyelids or staggered irises. The peculiar grammar of these mirrors of the soul mingles with the startled yet slightly mischievous expression that is the norm for her figures. The enormous powers of association unleashed by this treatment recalls the interest of Pablo Picasso in mapping his subjects on simultaneous planes, especially as funneled in his own block prints.
The artist with puffed-up cheeks, in the historical park of the Museum Kurhaus in Kleve, 1991
The artist also saw herself as the eye and voice of the nature. Being a post-war-child, she grew up with a different understanding for nature than the consumer’s world of today. School classes planted young trees, every family grew their own herbals, had his own garden with fruit and vegetables – seeds and scrap for birds and nature: a perfect symbiosis. All her life, the artist was an herbalist, disdained clearings and condemned ecocide. The artist thought, that every plant and every living being possesses eyes (in the metaphorical sense) and therefore a soul. This attitude of natural philosophy is reflected in her graphics. Even her plants and animals are personified, have eyes and a mime, a countenance and feelings.
The graphic Krautkopf [“Cabbagehead”] for example symbolizes our inconsiderate treatment of natural balance through monoculture and the oppresssion of the plant as a living being. Baumkleid on the other hand is dedicated to a magnificiently old deciduous tree, implied to be chopped down on short notice, only because it stands at the wrong time and the wrong place, apparently annoying all the right people. These figures are loudly voicing the implied plead to look at their nicety, to not tread upon them or throw them carelessly away, pluck their petals or steal their tusks and horns.
Irmela Witteberg also takes up motifs that we know from Pablo Picasso: the disenfranchised and disinherited from life - misery, loneliness, sadness, the “Nature Morte”. She also exaggerated the forms in order to reinforce the expression of the tragic, but avoided dark colors and instead deliberately resorted to shrill, bright tones, as we know from street theater. You can see her influences from surrealism and cubism, as Paul Cézanne once put it: “All forms in nature can be traced back to spheres, cones and cylinders.” But it's more than that, otherwise it wouldn't be art.
The Jolly Daubs are brought to you by Studio Eskamotage - Art and Whimsy. Some of our other Projects might be of interest to you:
