ISABEL PARKES: PUBLIC, RELATIONS
Public, RelationsNew Paintings by Norbert Erwin Witzgall
Evans & Witt | 58 Long Lane London EC1A 9EJ
Curated by Isabel Parkes
Norbert Erwin Witzgall has dedicated much of his career to portraiture, cued to the tensions it exposes between person and persona. Public, Relations brings together a selection of paintings that capture this paradox and explore the relationship between representation, fame and intimacy. Princess Diana anchors the exhibition as the ultimate image-driven concept of celebrity. Besieged by a picture of her own happiness throughout her life and chased by paparazzi until the moment of her death, her image – charismatic and shy, mainstream and defiant – embodies the dilemma of a publicly lived, private life.
Set in a copy and stationary shop in the commercial center of London, Public, Relations reflects on the business of image making. Witzgall’s portraits are drawn from a rich archive of photographic source material and together form an anachronous community of actors, friends, collectors and historical figures. His fascination with the overlap of private and public performances of identities unites these categories of people and generates a fluid, diaristic practice.
Faces – the currency of much of Witzgall’s work – are increasingly obscured by patterns that could be makeup, gestural backgrounds that seep onto skin, or flesh tones that spread across entire images and make headshots into masks.
In Untitled (Cary),midcentury film star Cary Grant appears with slack eyes, like a rubber costume of himself.
In Untitled (Louis), lines from a shirt’s fabric drift onto hands and face, elegantly enhancing the sitter’s bone structure. In Untitled (Annemarie), a linear knit locks its subject onto a dramatic painted plane. While Witzgall muddies our ability to identify individuals, he also elucidates the complex system of social and symbolic representation that creates a public image. As the exhibition in Evans & Witt unfolds, his works amplify the friction between concealing and revealing characters who have been cast in roles – Cary Grant as Hollywood’s hetero heartthrob or Annemarie Schwarzenbach as a queer icon – that they did not necessarily choose.
Norbert Erwin Witzgall loves to look at portraits but rarely trusts them. His own emphasize the space between what we can see and what we can know. Previewing over three consecutive nights during London’s Frieze Art Fair, Public, Relations explores our insatiable desire to identify and narrate the lives of those around us. Amidst the hype, Witzgall’s work alerts us to the tricks and truths of both observation and imagination, and the ongoing influence one exerts over the other.
Norbert Erwin Witzgall (*1976, Münchberg, Germany) studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Nürnberg, Ecole des Beaux Arts, Lyon, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, and Universität der Künste, Berlin. He has exhibited at venues including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Autocenter and Basso (Berlin), Kunstverein Nürnberg, Deweer (Otegem, Belgium) and Venetia Kapernekas (NYC). He currently teaches fine art at Berlin’s Universität der Künste. This is his first solo exhibition in London.