German artist André Wendland (born 1995 in Leonberg) presents his new series Animalistic Lipstick in this exhibition. Wendland's visual language, inspired by cartoons and animated films, unfolds in figurative compositions marked by bold color fields and a playful approach to form.
In Animalistic Lipstick hybrid bodies full of allure, danger, and mystery inhabit the pictorial worlds. Vivid colors, tangled shapes, and occasionally grotesque features speak of a shifting boundary: between nature and culture, between beauty and threat. The resulting creatures resist clear categorization sometimes grotesque, sometimes seductive. The intense use of color amplifies this ambivalence it attracts and repels, exaggerates, distorts, and plays with our perception. Beneath all the seduction and menace, a subtle humor runs through the works a subversive wit that renders the animalistic elements playful as well.
It is precisely within this tension that Wendland's paintings reveal their unique power. They lead us into visual realms where the wild and the artificial, the threatening and the whimsical, merge. His painterly approach in this series is as dynamic as it is intuitive: from free forms, animalistic beings gradually emerge, only taking shape through the compositional process. The paintings evolve through a fluid development in which figure and surface, instinct and design, challenge one another Ultimately, it is the harmonious composition that holds everything together it organizes the chaos, condenses instinct and surface into a balance in which the animalistic not only appears, but reinvents itself.
/ Marianna Schultze
/ Marianna Schultze
Kilde: Annika Nuttall Gallery
