Martin DislerBilder vom Maler

In a fictitious letter to the Swiss painter, who died in Geneva in 1996, Friedrich Meschede writes on the occasion of the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld that his paintings appear “like battlegrounds, a wrestling with the gestures of the figures, with the recalcitrance of the tough paste of paint, in order to bring it all together into a certain physiognomy.” Martin Disler was one of the outstanding protagonists of the so-called wild painting of the 1980s, and yet he himself always preferred to see in himself the failed man of letters. Accordingly, the present catalogue – idiosyncratic and authentic in its effect, its book block merely held together by solid staples – reproduces in facsimile not only the acrylic works on canvas, monotypes, aquatints and linocuts (all of them in large formats) as well as a series of terracottas, but also several of Martin Disler’s original manuscripts, which, as Meta Marina Beeck writes, likewise underline that the new generation of artists marked “the incursion of punk culture into the established and conservative cultural system.” And Paul Maenz, Martin Disler’s gallerist between 1984 and 1989, observes: “Even if that intoxicating, outrageous and certainly also indigestible success lasted less than ten years (is that not true of all the movements of the twentieth century?), this breaking of the rules, this unexpected tracheotomy of the early 1980s changed the way we look at things. And almost incidentally it brought home to us that our contemporary ’multiple self’ had by then come to be at home nowhere other than in the age of postmodernism, in the present. … But the wave that carried him along – and that did not make him happy – at the same time obscured the fact that Disler’s art springs from sources quite different from what was en vogue in those years as the new painting: his fields of subject matter were not burlesque taboo-breaking (Dokoupil), not socio-agitational sarcasm (Büttner) or exotic pictorial hybrids (Clemente), but rather – yes, let us simply call it that – desire, the devotion to desire to the point of existential self-consumption. The existential vibration, the claim to totality, the inescapability of these works together with their longing to embrace the whole world and to see love, sexuality and death as one: all of this describes a cosmos beyond what the new painting of his contemporaries wanted and sought. In Martin Disler and his art we are dealing with a solitary figure, without any current allegiance or stylistic affiliation. Fundamental, all-embracing themes such as love, desire and death point beyond the day and beyond one’s own time.”

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