Martin Wehmer: Body Fragments
Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong
24 September - 31 October 2020
MARTIN WEHMER
Women 2, 2019
Oil on Canvas, 170 x 100 cm
© Martin Wehmer, Courtesy Contemporary by Angela Li
Contemporary by Angela Li presents Body Fragments, the fourth Hong Kong solo exhibition of Beijing-based German artist MARTIN WEHMER, in conjunction with the launch of his new book MJB and the first edition of Central West Hong Kong, an art initiative by a collective of galleries in the Central West District. Martin Wehmer has been painting in his signature heavy impasto style for more than three decades, a technique he has mastered through premeditated brush and palette-knife strokes. Highly expressive with painterly gestures whilst stripping down “the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”, Martin Wehmer adopts an ideology by Hans Hofmann and develops a one-of-a-kind artistic language of his own, while integrating his personal experience of living in China as a foreigner onto his canvases.
Martin Wehmer has been living and working in Beijing as an artist and an art educator since 2008. He has held a number of successful exhibitions in China and around the world, and continued to foster and forge exchange with numerous art communities. His artistic practice, however, have not been directly influenced by Chinese art as the artist grounded himself deeply in the exploration of Abstract Expressionism. Martin Wehmer compares himself to the late German American painter Hans Hofmann who was a pivotal figure in Abstract Expressionism, not from the artistic point-of-view but the similarity in their directions in life. “He was from Germany and later became a teacher, a founder of the New York School and an important artist in America. This direction is very similar to mine because I am also from Germany, I am a teacher and an artist in China. We both transfer our believes and theories from our own country to another. Exchange in ideas can change the world,” Martin Wehmer said. As a foreign artist in China, Martin Wehmer continues to take up the cultural challenge and experience through living and working in Beijing.
MARTIN WEHMER
Yan, 2019
Oil on Canvas, 45 x 60cm
© Martin Wehmer, Courtesy Contemporary by Angela Li
The exhibition titles, both English and Chinese, are derived from Martin Wehmer’s unique observations of human postures and daily objects from his everyday surroundings or those he comes across on Wechat and the internet. Following on the idea of eliminating the unnecessary, Martin Wehmer visually and carefully dissects ‘Body’ into ‘Fragments’ with his impasto strokes. “For the whopping visibility of Martin Wehmer’s paintings would be entirely misunderstood if you described it as an abandonment of the visible world,” Hans-Joachim Müller commented, an art critic and a contributor of Martin Wehmer’s latest publication MJB. What is being captured seems unintentional, like ‘an uncontrolled photography’ described by Müller that is taken by accident, but the simplification of representation in Martin Wehmer’s works is an intentional effort to remove unnecessary details to achieve a unified form between gesture and representation. Similarly, with the Chinese title <部首>, the idea is taken from the literal meanings of each of the characters as ‘parts and head’ rather than the direct translate of the word as a whole – Chinese radical, a graphical component of a Chinese character. Martin Wehmer’s works are almost sculptural in their application, with every bold palette-knife stroke giving forms to segments of the body, sharing a glimpse of fragments of the artist’s life in China.
This exhibition brings together 12 paintings that fall short of ordinary portraits, from partial feminine figures to closeups of hands, eyes and lips. None of the persons depicted can be identified as unique individuals due to the lack of defined details, but the imageries are still refined enough to go beyond generic representations of the body. Martin Wehmer invites viewers to look at his works with an open mind and heart in order to achieve open interpretations. “There is no contemporary art without open minds and free human beings,” Martin Wehmer said.
MARTIN WEHMER was born in Blankenstein J. Hattingen, Germany in 1966. He was awarded the Volksbanken art prize in Germany in 1996. He later took up art residencies in Edinburgh and Beijing, and finally decided to settle in Beijing in 2008, where he has lived and worked since. He was one of the organizers of the Beijing 798 Biennale in 2009. Martin Wehmer is also a devout art educator. He has been a lecturer at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, and headed the CDK project, a joint programme of the University of the Arts, Berlin and the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, facilitating art exchange between China and Germany. His works have been exhibited extensively around the world, and have been included in important collections such as UBS (Hong Kong, Cologne, Zürich), Kunstkredit Basel and Kultusministerium Kanton Basel.
CONTEMPORARY BY ANGELA LI
G/F, 248 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
