The project 'Altitude Sickness' was conceived in response to Hitler�s Eagle�s Nest at Berchtesgaden and its subsequent conversion to a tourist restaurant following World War Two. Initially presented to Hitler in 1939, as a gift from senior Nazi officials on the occasion of his 50th birthday, it has become synonymous with a particular archive of wartime footage. For Willems this image of the F�hrer in the bosom of alpine serenity was not insignificant. It was his earliest memory of Hitler on television and one that presented a hideous antithesis to the realities of war and the �Final Solution�. Within a broader thematic of misplaced context, it was preceded directly by the painting Alpine Review. What appears to be an Albino Darth Vader, meekly foregrounded on the steps leading up to Kehlsteinhaus, becomes a warped reference to Nazi eugenics and Manichean clich�s. Star Wars becomes a strategic link to the real history that informed a movie�s fiction. As a Stormtrooper gazes into the F�hrer�s fireplace at Kehlsteinhaus, echoing his Nazi namesakes, his abandonment recalls iconic footage of Hitler himself at this mountain retreat.
A Certain Way to Fade
Part of a broader project that focuses on news stories about hermits, A certain way to fade was conceived in response to the story of Manfred Gn�dinger. Like much of Willems� work, the complexity of choice and purpose within personalised utopias remains constant. Originally a native German, Gn�dinger migrated to the small fishing village of Cammelle in Northern Spain in the late sixties. It is said he went mad there after falling in love with a teacher in the village who refused his advances. A few years later, after becoming sensitized to ecological issues, he built himself a small hut on the beach where he spent the next forty years. He quickly became a local curiosity, referred to in Galician as O Alem�n (the German) and then just Man � a name he eagerly accepted for its symbolism.
During this period he built an extensive oeuvre of beach-derived sculpture and artworks, as a museum within the organic garden he created and ate from. He had no electricity or running water in his hut and was a strict vegetarian. He would charge tourists one euro to enter his museum-garden. Gn�dinger�s world was crushed when the Prestige oil spill of 2002 blighted the northern Spanish coastline, destroying most of his garden and its contents. Soon afterwards he was found dead in his self-made home, where it is thought he died of heartbreak and depression following the oil spill.
Willems� interest in O Aleman is not solely in Gn�dinger's choice to live this way but more critically in how he was championed as a symbol of the oil spill tragedy, exacerbating his local fame to a point of overwhelming media intrusion that subsequently affected his mental health and eventual death. Willems has taken tourist photographs as a thematic platform and catalyst for the project. His diminutive paintings outline a beaten terrain, where Gn�dinger�s sculptures appear like other-worldly relics. Certain ideas present themselves as viable motifs. One recurring theme from earlier work is the slogan-bannered plane. Taken as a sign of corporate advertising, the banners spell out various references to the story and its context in Galician, which echo the English titles. Tourist detritus and other details present a similar logic as a ubiquitous metaphor of wholesale consumption: the abandoned baseball cap, the half-eaten fast food and the menacing presence of the seagull parasite.
SIMON LEE, London presents IN LINES AND REALIGNMENTS
26 June - 28 August 2013
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present In Lines and Realignments, a group exhibition curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Thom O'Nions which brings together the work of six artists currently living and working in Sao Paulo along with documentation of a work by Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles
Hammelehle und Ahrens, Cologne presents ANDREAS RUTHI
until 27 July 2013
Ruthi works directly from observation, creating complex formal compositions that bring together a variety of interests, with art historical references, found objects and his personal history all occupying equal importance and value of meaning. This exhibition can be seen to show the development of Ruthi's distinct painterly style with new paintings made during the last four years, split into two series ? the book paintings and the more recent Morandiesque still life paintings.
Driss Ouadahi is an Algerian artist, born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1959. Throughout his artistic career, Driss Ouadahi has created special links between architecture and painting. The resulting works are abstract compositions featuring grid patterns, whose density evokes the architecture of the outskirts of big cities and their tightly woven networks of high-rise housing.
