Sławomir Elsner – Precision and Chance

Bonnet analyses Elsner’s evocations and believes that his graphical works in the early catastrophe subjects “remind us that each picture is a challenge to visualise an image, an image of one’s own expectations and willingness to have a visual experience and insight. How much do we project and how much do we recognise? How do we look at a poster and how do we look at a Rubens? How much is cultural convention and how much is our own authentic experience?” The previous museum stops and the Wiesbaden exhibition have gone along with Elsner’s strategy of appealing to the collective memory by keeping a substantial spatial distance between the historical originals and his works. It goes without saying though that, during the exhibition in the Hospitalhof in Stuttgart, the historical role models continued to hang in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Following an earlier exhibition in the Lenbachhaus, Marianne von Werefkin’s “Tänzer Alexander Sacharoff” had long found itself back in its true home in Ascona and, in Wiesbaden too, there is quite a distance between Elsner’s exhibition and the museum’s collection.

Several series of coloured-pencil drawings, which the artist worked on from 2006 after Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” and entitled “Populaires”, “Displaced”, “Odyssee” and “Selfshots” and which are based on photographs and have different conceptual implications, have not been considered for the Wiesbaden exhibition. They were shown in 2012 to mark the awarding of the Falkenrot Prize to the artist in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and have been documented in the accompanying catalogue. In 2006, the Galerie Gebr. Lehmann in Dresden showed Elsner’s oil paintings from the “Panorama” series, for which no less than 130 pictures in various sizes, from cabinet pieces to wall-filling formats, were produced in the same year; two years later an extensive catalogue was published as well. In this series, the artist turned magazine photos from the year of his birth 1976 and taken from the popular Kattowice magazine “Panorama”, into oil paintings. What was special about the magazine images was that they had been cut out and reprinted from Western press products by the editors to contrast the socialist reality in Poland with a certain cosmopolitan outlook, which peaked with the pin-up girls, the “Girls of the week”, which were also reproduced. As the Warsaw art historian, publicist and gallery owner Łukasz Gorczyca writes in the catalogue, in his paintings Elsner did not just document the graphic and colour imperfections of these reprints; above all he captured “the roots and political conditions of contemporary visual culture” in an image. Elsner analysed “how to this day graphical and political deformations make their mark on our consciousness, our sensibility and our historical memory”.

The Wiesbaden exhibition goes hand in hand with the awarding of the Otto Ritschl Prize to Sławomir Elsner in 2020. The prize is awarded by the Museumsverein Ritschl e.V. in collaboration with the museum and also includes prize money and the exhibition organised by the museum. The prize is awarded in memory of the author and painter Otto Ritschl (1885-1976), who was based in Wiesbaden and was an excellent exponent of abstract art. It is given to notable artists nationwide whose work “has as its subject matter colour and colour space” and was previous awarded to Gotthard Graubner in 2001, to Ulrich Erben in 2003, to Kazuo Katase in 2009 and to Katharina Grosse in 2015. On the occasion of the award ceremony, Andreas Henning, Director of the Museums Wiesbaden and jury member, stated: I have been observing the high level of artistic talent and the impressive consistency with which Elsner turns his attention to the basic artistic phenomena and, at the same time, develops a very independent position in the contemporary art scene.”

Axel Feuß, February 2022

Literature:

Slawomir Elsner. Präzision und Unschärfe / Precision and Chance, published by Andreas Henning and Lea Schäfer, Exhibition catalogue of Museum Wiesbaden and Dr. Cantz’sche Verlagsgesellschaft, Berlin, 2021 (with essays by Lea Schäfer: Zur Aneignung des visuellen Gedächtnisses – Bilddiskurse im Frühwerk von Slawomir Elsner; Anne-Marie Bonnet: Paradoxien der Schönheit – Slawomir Elsners zeichnerisch-malerische Evokationen; Nils Ohlsen: Lichtatem – Slawomir Elsners abstrakte Aquarelle; 144 pages, German/English)

Sławomir Elsner. Coloured Pencil Drawings. Falkenrot Prize 2012, Exhibition catalogue of the  Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2012 (with text by Raimar Stange: Windows on the World. Kunst nach Nine-Eleven; Natalie de Ligt: Populaires. Bilder entstehen im Kopf; Esther Ruelfs: Stills. An den Rändern des Mediums; Chris Lünsmann: Phantome. Die im Dunkeln sieht man doch; Karin Pernegger: Selfshots. Die Löschung des Selbstbildnisses; 96 pages, German/English)

Sławomir Elsner. Panorama, Exhibition catalogue of the Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden/Berlin, Cologne: Dumont-Buchverlag, 2008 (with text by Łukasz Gorczyca: Panorama, 1976; 158 pages, Polish/German/English)

Internet:

Sławomir Elsner’s Curriculum Vitae on the Galerie Gebr. Lehmann website, Dresden/Berlin, last completed up to 2021, https://www.galerie-gebr-lehmann.de/artists/slawomir-elsner/cv/

Exhibition in the Hospitalhof Stuttgart, 2015, https://www.hospitalhof.de/kunst/ausstellungen-archiv/slawomir-elsner-nichts-ist-wie-es-scheint/

Exhibition as a summer guest in Museen Böttcherstraße in Bremen in 2017, https://www.museen-boettcherstrasse.de/ausstellungen/sommergast-2017-slawomir-elsner/

Exhibition in the Blauer Reiter Collection at the Lenbachhaus Munich 2020, https://www.lenbachhaus.de/entdecken/ausstellungen/detail/slawomir-elsner

Exhibition “Precision and Chance” in the Museum Wiesbaden, 2021/22, https://museum-wiesbaden.de/slawomir-elsner 

Interview with Ritschl prize winner Sławomir Elsner on the website of the Freunde des Museums Wiesbaden, 2021, https://www.freunde-museum-wiesbaden.de/news/interview-mit-slawomir-elsner/

(All links were last accessed in February 2021.)