We are pleased to announce the US debut exhibition of Swiss artist Uwe Wittwer, including large scale watercolors, paintings and unique inkjet prints.

While the works are figurative, Wittwer is more accurately a painter of images. His source material is chosen from the overwhelming sea of digital representations – images of images – found on the internet. Wittwer’s dominant interests are old master paintings and vernacular photographs of families and soldiers.

The show is centered on two massive watercolors based on 17th Century paintings by Nicolas Poussin. Their size and strength upend the typical prejudice towards watercolors as small and delicate. Across the gallery a group of 5 medium sized watercolors are based on photographs from family albums dating from the 1940s-60s, which suggest subtle narratives when seen as a whole.

The back gallery will feature large scale, black and white inkjet prints based on photographs by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Although entirely digital from beginning to end they are undeniably painterly, and rely on formal conventions similar to those of the watercolors. Usually rendered in negative, the watercolors and inkjet prints share a sinister sense of confronting memories or a history that may be difficult to face.

Wittwer denies the conventional hierarchy of media in favor of his engagement with images. Similarly, through the filter of the internet a painting by Poussin enjoys no hierarchy over an anonymous snapshot. The compositions found in a soldier’s photograph are as valid as the classical structure of the Old Masters. Both are representations of history with blurred, and possibly irrelevant, distinctions between ‘reality’ and fabrication.

Uwe Wittwer was born in 1954 and is based in Zurich. His work has recently been the focus of solo exhibitions and publications by Haunch of Venison Zurich, the Ludwigforum Aachen, and the Kunstmuseum Solothurn.