SASCHA WEIDNER
12/01/–23/02/2008
In Enduring Beauty Weidner presents his most recent works, created during his second stay in Los Angeles as a DAAD scholar, as well as showing earlier works. These are arranged in a way that examines not only his creative practice but also the autobiographical narrative structure that is present in all of his work.
“Enduring Beauty reports and records that which our restless gaze has passed over and that which remains caught as a vague moment of memory. Alluding to a catastrophic war policy and to a military offensive with a very similar name, the artist Sascha Weidner questions claims of truth and validity and highlights an inherent contradiction: what does not actually exist cannot be absolute and has neither claim to allembracing validity, nor can it be enduring. And so, it is also not the terminal point of beauty. That which can potentially be stigmatised as »conventionally beautiful« is thus dethroned and, simultaneously, is re-elevated through aesthetic pictorial language.Sascha Weidner stages the beauty of the small and the detailed; removed from the fast pace of daily life, from which these motifs were taken. Using cropped photographs, he creates something monumental without overstatement through expansive gestures: there is no exaggerated perspective, spatial distance, or fusion of volumes. Weidner recreates the form and the object, and produces an individual context, without entering into the realm of alienation. Shapes move around in what appears to be fog without space; we see an aeroplane in a wall, and our associations range from childish temper tantrums to full-blown adult chaos.” Dorothea Schöne, LACMA, Los Angeles
