Marcus Weber: Krazy Dog Moon Kat

Desolate and romantic

KRAZY DOG MOON KAT - this is the title of the book accompanying Marcus Weber's exhibition at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen, which for the first time presents a broad selection of paintings by the artist, who was born in Stuttgart in 1965 and lives in Berlin. These are narrative, tongue-in-cheek pictures, allusive group portraits and urban landscapes with grotesque reformulations of social orders and/or with caricaturally exaggerated individual characters. There are flashes of painterly sophistication, so that some works can be read as capriccio, desolate and romantic at the same time. And painterly forefathers always resonate - Marcus Weber's enthusiasm for artists such as James Ensor or Philip Guston is unmistakable. The result is a grotesque mixture that defies any hierarchy and builds productive bridges to the realm of the comics of Georg Herriman as well as to art history, as Weber is a genre painter in the best tradition of painting social pictures. He depicts idiosyncratic communities - such as isolated men at bar counters, people reading art magazines, guys hanging out in designer furniture or café scenes in which masked people come together - but above all, he also pays great attention to delicate details, such as three scoops of ice cream or a slice of cake called a Danube wave. As a subtle and multi-layered reaction to current political and social conditions, these works easily outshine the so-called new history painting, which is usually limited to the painting of press photos. Accordingly, on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in the USA, the New York Times (2 May 2018) certified that the artist had embarked on a surprisingly topical path by imitating the unavoidable in real life.

Exhibition:
Villa Merkel Galleries of the City of Esslingen, 24/6 - 19/8/2018