Mathias Schauwecker
The powerful figures in Mathias Schauwecker’s large paintings on paper at the Zhou B. Art Center disconcertingly blur the line between man and beast. They’re also humorous, as in Lazy as a… and Brave as a…, where the human figures look froglike. Schauwecker says that some viewers have said the creature with its back to us in Stubborn as a… resembles a gorilla. Croak Like a… depicts a gorilla but gives it the stature and grandeur usually reserved for portraits of people. Some of the paintings–there are also smaller ones and two sets of drawings–have vibrant backgrounds of squiggly wormlike shapes as animistic as the figures, enlivening them.
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“My preference for the grotesque is my German side,” says Schauwecker, who’s Swiss-German by heritage and grew up in Zurich. “I’ve always found the ‘ugly’ more intriguing than the ‘beautiful.’” He began copying from books on Leonardo and Michelangelo when he was ten; three years later he enrolled in a drawing class, where the teacher “was very surprised and very happy that somebody was so interested in Renaissance art.” For five years Schauwecker attended classes, where he drew from live models; he also copied the Frans Hals in the Zurich museum and painted his father and mother at home. In 1986 he moved to Paris, where he lives today, to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. “My first year was fantastic,” he says. “I met all my best friends then, and they are still my best friends.” One was British art historian Iain Watson, who provided the texts Schauwecker has scattered throughout the show.
