Category: Art
Wieland Payer’s first London solo exhibition brings together recent works on paper, sculpture and painting. He is best known for his intricate drawings in charcoal and pastel depicting mountains and woodland, from which protrude strange objects and buildings that seem to have been plucked from some future era — but which may equally be derelict altars to modernism, projected into post-apocalyptic landscapes.
Wieland Payer’s work originates from close dialogue with German Romanticism: it is always concerned with the monumental and dynamic presence of natural phenomena, capable of giving human beings a sense of their own relativity. Whilst the work is inspired by reality, Wieland Payer’s response to the natural world is never forensic, but rather aesthetic and also surreal. His landscapes are full of visual and spatial paradoxes that remove them from the realm of actual experience. They are beautiful and awe inspiring, yet present us with a vision of the natural world that is far from bucolic and, at times, hostile. This is hinted at in the title of the exhibition, an oblique reference to Tom Wait’s song, ‘What’s He Building In There’. In the song, the question is never answered, but the implication is that whatever is being constructed is menacing and perhaps even murderous.
Opening hours: Tuesday — Saturday, 11am — 7pm