Claude Wall and Stefan Pietryga in the Kunstraum Bernusstraße Frankfurt
frankfurt ⋅ One or the other joke must be there. After all, it is no coincidence that the exhibition by Claude Wall and Stefan Pietryga is titled “Multiple Comments”. Although both of them like to refer back to art history with their works and Wall in particular showed reverence for the avant-garde from Malevich to Fontana in his pictures, the comments in the Kunstraum Bernusstraße were primarily self-ironic. “If you can’t earn any money with your work,” the artist, who turned 70 last year, added about two paintings that were found after van Gogh, “then just say it’s art.”
And that’s exactly what the Stuttgart artist does. However, this does not automatically make the creators of all the works he discovered at flea markets, based on well-known or completely unknown masters, artists. It’s mostly kitsch, plain and simple. And only Wall makes something completely different out of him, for example when he traces the contours of a picture after Caspar David Friedrich with glue, rehearses the “fraternization without effort” via an anonymous etching or with “Fontana am Matterhorn” the picturesque Swiss mountains reflected with the knife.
In comparison, one would hardly want to call Stefan Pietryga’s work funny at first. Sure, the artist, who was born in 1954, also occasionally uses overpainting when he presents Rembrandt’s graphic sheets, admittedly not original etchings but facsimiles as collotypes, with his tumbling, floating and falling figures in Yves Klein blue. Or he uses the paraphrase, as he did three years ago in the same place with a watercolor based on Lotte Laserstein’s “Abend über Potsdam”.
As commentaries on art history, Pietryga’s works may appear as Walls of tableaux sealed with wood glue. Here, as it shows a bright blue “poplar” written from a trunk in the garden of the gallery, but it also shows “The construction site” and the sun-yellow sheep made of linden wood, the artist, who lives in Potsdam, actually comes from the sculpture. In this respect, the powerful watercolor “Himmel und Berg”, created in 1980, would undoubtedly be called a key work not only in the “Multiple Comments” but also in Pietryga’s entire oeuvre.