Martin Disler: Bilder vom Maler

This is the point of no return

In a fictitious letter to the Swiss painter, who died in Geneva in 1996, Friedrich Meschede wrote on the occasion of the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld that his paintings appeared "like battlefields, a struggle for the gestures of the figures, for the stubbornness of the viscous colour paste, to bring everything together into a certain physiognomy". Martin Disler was one of the outstanding protagonists of so-called Wild Painting in the 1980s, but he always preferred to see himself as a failed man of letters. For this reason, this catalogue, which has an idiosyncratic and authentic look and whose book block is merely solidly stapled, facsimiles some of Martin Disler's original manuscripts alongside the acrylic works on canvas, monotypes, aquatints, linocuts (all in large formats) and a series of terracottas, which, as Meta Marina Beeck writes, also underline the fact that the new generation of artists marked "the penetration of punk culture into the established and conservative cultural system". And Paul Maenz, Martin Disler's gallery owner between 1984 and 1989, states: "Even if the intoxicating, unheard-of and certainly uncomfortable success didn't last ten years (doesn't that apply to all movements of the 20th century?), this break in the rules, this unexpected tracheotomy of the early 1980s changed our perspective. And almost incidentally, it made us realise that our contemporary 'multiple ego' was now at home nowhere else than in the age of postmodernism, in the present. ... But the wave that carried him along - and which did not make him happy - also obscured the fact that Disler's art originated from completely different sources than what was en vogue as New Painting in those years: His subject matter was not burlesque taboo-breaking (Dokoupil), not socio-agitational sarcasm (Büttner) or exotic pictorial crossbreeds (Clemente), but - yes, let's call it that - desire, the devotion to desire to the point of existential self-consumption. The existential vibration, the claim to totality, the indispensability of these works, together with their longing to embrace the whole world and to see love, sexuality and death as one, all describe a cosmos beyond what the New Painting of his contemporaries wanted and sought. With Martin Disler and his art, we are dealing with a solitaire, without current ties or stylistic affiliation. Fundamental, all-encompassing themes such as love, desire and death point beyond the day and time."

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 19/3 - 3/7/2016