Uwe Wittwer: Shelter

Uwe Wittwer Shelter

Things are not as they seem. 50 years ago, in 1968, Keith Richards was holed up in the art dealer Robert Fraser’s flat on Mount Street, London. Looking out from the third floor window Richards saw the onset of a sudden storm and figures in the street below running for cover. From that simple image came a song, Gimme Shelter, widely regarded as The Rolling Stones’ finest, and emblematic of a cultural shift at the end of the 1960s. Yet the genesis of the song, Richard’s simple observation, cannot account for its enduring and uncanny power. Nothing is as it seems, nothing is as simple as it at first seems, and other events were playing out at that moment. Richards had borrowed Fraser’s flat to be in town while his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg was filming Performance (another work of art that is not as it seems, a strange and powerful film that initially seems to be a conventional gangster flick but which quickly turns into an hallucinatory meditation on questions of selfhood and identity). And Pallenberg was apparently involved in an on-set affair with her co-star, Mick Jagger. Elsewhere, there was war in Vietnam and riots on the streets of Paris. And somehow, all this context bleeds into the song, which fills with a mounting sense of apocalyptic dread, a dread that peaks a year later when Meredith Hunter is killed in front of the stage as the Stones play Altamont. This, then, is a song that, while it speaks about one thing, is about another. All of which is a way of talking about connections and interconnectivity. All of which is a roundabout way of talking about Uwe Wittwer’s paintings.

For this too, is how Wittwer’s art works. These paintings are not about the song Gimme Shelter, holiday camps or the plight of the Japanese-American civilians interned at Manzanar in California between 1942-45. Those are undoubtedly important subjects in their own right, and each painting stands

on its own as a striking image and speaks of these powerful histories. But taken together, interwoven, they are more. We might say then that the body of work rather than the singular painting is Wittwer’s true medium. Fragments of lyrics from the song become the glue that binds these disparate moments but the actual subject is elsewhere. Images and words are pointers that direct us towards it. And what is it? We talk about the idea of ‘shelter’ but really that is too limiting. Something of safety and protection but also ambiguity. And something unsayable. The power of art is that it speaks of something that can’t be put clearly into words.

Uwe Wittwer’s work reflects on the nature and meaning of images. His source material is carefully chosen from digital representations – images of images –researched in the depths of the internet. These new works bring together several historic reference points. Images of camps – including classic British seaside holiday camps, GI hooches and military internment camps – are contrasted with depictions of watchtowers, flags and a simple makeshift tent amongst trees. In a series of watercolours of postcards sent home from East German ‘Pioneer’ camps, the images are disrupted by the poignant messages written on the reverse of the cards.

The watchtower is a recurring image in Wittwer’s work and can be read as a cipher for the figure of the artist as panoptic observer. The idea of the camp, with its contradictory associations with leisure and imprisonment, home and displacement, is a central theme that Wittwer has returned to many times. ‘Shelter’ becomes an ambiguous state.

In dealing with his source material, Wittwer deconstructs the original, using

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Directors

Ben Tufnell, Matt Watkins

Gallery Manager

Leanne Parks

Gallery Assistant

Fionnuala Keane-Conley

Photography

Peter Mallet

All

Uwe Wittwer Shelter 25 May – 14 July 2018 02

Exhibitions and Sales

Marta Jiménez Tubau

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Manzanar 2018

artworks © the artist Cover: Uwe Wittwer The Garden,

the negative, repetition, fragmentation or reversal. Through such strategies images are transformed, creating alternative realities. The suggestion is that new meanings and new possibilities can be

discovered within pre-existing images, no matter how familiar. Nothing is as it seems. And meaning sits somewhere in the gap between the image and the ways in which we can talk about it.

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Uwe Wittwer Cover 2018 Oil on canvas 150 × 135 cm

Uwe Wittwer

The Garden, Manzanar

2018

Oil on canvas

150 × 195 cm

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Uwe Wittwer

The Bookkeeper

2018

Watercolour on paper

54 × 74 cm

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Uwe Wittwer

The Observer’s Delight, Manzanar

2018

Oil on canvas

150 × 135 cm

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Uwe Wittwer

Red Carpet

2018

Watercolour on paper

114 × 80 cm

Uwe Wittwer

It’s Just a Shot Away

2018

Watercolour on paper

53 × 36 cm

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Uwe Wittwer

Flags 2018

Oil on canvas

150 × 135 cm

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Uwe Wittwer

Blossin

2018