With rich jewel-like colors and intricate detail, Erik Weisenburger's paintings enchant the eye. On first inspection, his compositions recall traditional history and still-life painting. The Chicago-based Weisenburger draws from history, myths, bible stories, and fables to lend a timeless quality to his pictorial narratives. Yet he complicates conventional genre painting with a contemporary tragicomic sensibility. Inspired both by historical figures and current events, his works are elegies-pensive, often mournful, reflections on the past and present.
Prior to the nature and garden memorials, Weisenburger pictured bears, ducks, and other animals outfitted and formally posed as military leaders. Associating nature with the military arose from his feeling of hunter's remorse and his thoughts on humanity's misuse of nature. Although they recall children's book illustrations, the animals' gestures relate to historical military portraiture in which the subject's attributes indicated his fate as victorious, wounded, or dead. In these early works, Weisenburger altered traditional symbolism of military figures and animals to upend accepted meanings and invite new interpretations.
In the Monumentum Naturae paintings, plants, animals, insects, and flowers that might not exist together in nature mingle in fictitious worlds. Weisenburger creates allegories that play off commonly held perceptions of certain plants and creatures. For instance, ants are a collective social unit industriously working towards a single goal. More often, the paintings are flights of fancy with ominous undertones. The grasshopper of Aesop's fable is the carefree spendthrift who fritters away the summer jumping here and there instead of preparing for winter. In another scene, poppies with their opiates put the busy bee to sleep.
Weisenburger's current series of paintings honors artists that have been influential to him. The first of the memorial gardens, Roger's Garden, pays tribute to the Chicago artist Roger Brown; Weisenburger began the painting just after Brown's death in 1997. Another garden is dedicated to Richard Nickel, a photographer and archivist who documented Chicago architecture in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Through studying Nickel's work, Weisenburger became enamored with the stylized nature motifs utilized by architect Louis Sullivan to ornament his buildings. Weisenburger found in Sullivan a kindred spirit who likewise saw an architectural structure to nature's organic forms. In Louis's Garden, a medallion of architectural ornament from a Sullivan design rests on the ground as if it were a ruin. The serpentine plant forms echo the intricacy of the ornament. A grasshopper (according to the artist, it represents Sullivan) bounds across the foreground.
In Henry's Garden, Weisenburger venerates Henry Darger, a reclusive artist recognized only after his death when thousands of drawings and a voluminous manuscript were found in his small apartment. For many years Darger worked on an epic complete with large-scale illustrations. The narrative obsessively details the plight of the seven Vivian Sisters, children who battled evil creatures and adults on a planet much like Earth. In Henry's Garden, the sisters are topiaries in a clearing framed by flowers and buffeted by a tumultuous storm. Weisenburger is not recreating one of the epic's scenes rather he emulates Darger's ability to give visual form to high drama.
Courtesy of Dean Jensen Gallery, Milwaukee, WIThe exactingly rendered flora and fauna of the Monumentum Naturae series act as protagonists in dramas that evoke varied interpretations from environmental politics to literary satire and surreal wildlife art. In his most recent paintings, Weisenburger creates memorial gardens to honor artists significant to him. These dream-like scenes filled with fragmented architecture, funerary statuary, topiaries, and overgrown plants function as memento mori conjuring thoughts of danger, decay, and death to remind us of life's fleeting nature.
A familiarity with the distinct iconography of European and American art referenced by the artist is not required for a full understanding of an individual painting. Rather, a viewer can grasp the narrative through the evocative episodes depicted. Ursa Memoriam pictures a bear as St. Sebastian, a frequent subject in Italian Renaissance painting. St. Sebastian was an early Christian martyr who miraculously survived being shot full of arrows. Weisenburger created his own version of the story after learning that a man in northern Wisconsin had baited a black bear into his yard and shot it from his porch. Concerned by such cruelty, Weisenburger painted this admittedly political composition, endowing the bear with the innocence and uprightness of a martyr. While his opinions on environmental issues make this image timely, the work also expresses timeless pathos for beings that have been unjustly threatened.
oil on panel, 33 1/2 x 23
Collection of Madison Art Center
Purchase through Rudolph and Louise Langer Fund
oil on panel, 8 1/2 x 8 1/2
Collection of Isabella LorenziAs a foundation for his narratives Weisenburger often employs a specific vocabulary, like that of religious figures, flower symbolism in Dutch sixteenth-century painting, and characters from myth. However, he departs from these codes as he adapts the signifiers to address contemporary issues. Turtle's Reflection depicts a box turtle on its back before a clear puddle of water. The scene is reminiscent of the ancient Greek myth of young, beautiful Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection. Upon closer inspection, the painting reveals more than this tale of the consequences of vanity. As the water rises, the doomed turtle cannot right itself. The painting speaks to the endangered status of the box turtle. The inclusion of a Jesus bug intones a moral buzz.
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oil on panel, 12 x 12 Courtesy of Dean Jensen Gallery Milwaukee, WI |
Simon's Garden (The River Sermon) depicts a luminescent sparrow perched high above a landscape. A river bisects the prairie and holds back a raging fire. Simon Sparrow was a street preacher and artist who sermonized at the Memorial Union and Library Mall of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a student in Madison, Weisenburger befriended Sparrow. The painting reflects the quality of Sparrow's preaching that would alternate between fire-and-brimstone and the promise of paradise. Carved on the rock is "iatromantis," a figure from Greek mythology who could cross from the realm of the living into that of the dead. For Weisenburger, Sparrow existed in both earthly and heavenly spheres.
Throughout his body of work, Weisenburger explores narrative, allegory, and iconography. In this regard, his paintings participate in an age-old visual storytelling tradition extending from hieroglyphics to contemporary animation. But his works go beyond illustration to engage an overarching theme: nature's beauty and its danger. His paintings embrace both morbid fascination and charming beauty. The allegorical scenes transfer this duality from nature onto human existence as the artist reflects upon fleeting life and inevitable death. But Weisenburger's paintings do not leave us with pessimism. He lightens his ruminations on mortality with a witty humor to provide us with a momentary diversion from the inescapable end.
Sara Krajewski, Curator of Exhibitions
Erik Weisenburger was organized by the Madison Art Center and received generous funding from the Exhibition Initiative Fund and the Madison Art Center's 1999-2000 Sustaining Benefactors. This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin.