opera / SCHWEIGER detlef (lavur) & STAUDINGER oskar (drawing)

30 May - 09 June 2025 (extended until 21 June 2025)

ONE WEEK SHOW Nr. 3

SCHWEIGER detlef – lavur

The wet-on-wet technique, the flowing distribution of colours, is referred to as glazing. The artist uses a self-made ink for glazing. The precise individual brushwork certainly also plays a major role. Schweiger's wash technique involves creating the form from the centre, from the brush location on his own primer, using a very special water as a flow agent. Detlef Schweiger's washes are scores of an idiosyncratic notation, a system of signs of an ambient meta-language that creates spherical, gentle, long-drawn-out, shortened, clumped, warm image compositions. The artist and willing recipients could use muzakal sound production to break out of the framework of purely pictorial representation, which continues to function as sound in the sense of a whole, as an aggregate of individually notated parts that are not really connected pictorially. The power of synaesthesia, ‘hearing’ colours and ‘tasting’ sounds, can thus be represented more significantly. However, their interpretation is subject to a more physiological-optical interpretation. A final quote from Pablo Picasso is permitted: ‘There are painters who turn the sun into a yellow spot. But there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, turn a yellow spot into the sun’ – how true – simply opera.

STAUDINGER oskar - drawing

Since early childhood, Oskar Staudinger has been accompanied by the work of Richard Wagner – a lifelong fascination that is deeply rooted in his artistic identity. He began to explore the evocative power of Wagner's music at an early age. The composer's onomatopoeic soundscapes opened up imaginary spaces for him, into which he escaped in his dreams – distant, mythically charged places beyond the everyday. It was therefore no coincidence that his first solo exhibition in 2017 was entitled ‘In a Faraway Land,’ a direct allusion to the aria of the same name from Wagner's romantic opera Lohengrin.

In his current series of works, Staudinger turns his artistic gaze to the monumental musical drama Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). The result is a series of intimate works on paper that explicitly depart from stage designs and traditional iconographic representations. Small in format and rendered in fine lines, these drawings deliberately create a counterworld to the exuberant power of the tetralogy. They are visual miniatures – poetic condensations – that open up new pictorial spaces, as it were. They invite contemplative viewing and reveal a multi-layered interplay between musical inspiration, individual imagination and artistic reflection. Staudinger's works thus not only continue a personal engagement with Wagner, but also offer new impulses for a contemporary approach to the myth.