Wanderlust

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Slag Gallery is pleased to present "Wanderlust," featuring new works by Paul Wesenberg.

Wesenberg is a German painter with a particular interest in the materiality of paint and canvas. His themes revolve around the essence of painting, the specifics of color and texture, landscape and natural phenomena, and wounds and miracles.
His approach reveals a nostalgic originating point and an irrepressible desire to display the claim and autonomy of the painting as opulently as possible in a present that no longer knows any binding patterns of meaning.

The free-swinging of his forms, here chaotic in the form agglomeration, there chiseled with emphasis on lines, on the one hand massively thickened in color, on the other hand carelessly fluid, turns his pictures into sensual event zones.

Paul Wesenberg enjoys experimenting and has developed his techniques. The use of double canvases, sometimes brutal cuts, and roughened surfaces gives his works aesthetic appeal. Precisely cut oilskins are applied to specific areas of the painting to reinforce the diversity of the surface relief and enhance the color experience. The oilskins are transformed into new color structures like particles governed by their own ordering principle.

Wesenberg's paintings often have an elegiac trait. With the exhibition title "Wanderlust," the artist emphasizes, on the one hand, his connection to the fundamental and still living tradition of German Romanticism and, on the other hand, his vote for the "open picture," which counteracts the conventional treatment of canvas. The canvas' wounding, opening, and breaking through underscores Wesenberg's longing for inwardness, for something beyond, for exploring the picture's depth and essence and human existence, whose vulnerability is revealed more than ever today.

Paul Wesenberg studied at the Kunstakademie Minsk and the Muthesius Art University in Kiel, Germany. He received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) award in 1995. His works have been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions in Berlin, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Winterthur, Tallinn, and Minsk since the 1990s. Wesenberg lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Solo exhibitions 2022-2023

• 2023 Kunstverein SpeyerStädtische

• 2022 Slag Gallery, NY

• 2022 Galerie Schwabach

• 2022 Galerie Rx, Paris

• 2022 Galerie Künstlerhaus Göttingen

• 2022 Kunstverein Ottobrunn

• 2022 Kunstverein Unna