room for humour

Press Archive 1996

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Fürther Nachrichten, 1996, REGINA URBAN

 

From rainmakers and kings

The exhibition of Doris Weller in the Hospital opens the colourful world of Igbos - picture boundaries are lifted

"Early Game", two-part picture by Doris Weller. Photo: Kögler

The paintings by the Nuremberg-based artist Doris Weller, which are currently exhibited in the Klinikum Fürth, take the viewer into a colourful fairy-tale world. Pictures of people with head and stomach out of simple geometric shapes, which are deliberately disproportionate and their faces just indicated, develop a childlike naive charm. By abstraction of the concrete form the view is directed towards the depicted event. Usually these people engage in activities - rituals or everyday activities. Some of it is visible, some only to be guessed. Images that stimulate the imagination and tell little stories.

 

Pictures from Nigeria, where Doris Weller met eight years ago the tribe of the Igbos and by Igbo-women cultivated art of ornamental wall painting. Since then, the artist, who studied at the Werkkunstschule in Würzburg and co-founded the "Kunstquartier" in Nuremberg an independent art school in the 80s, has completely turned away from her previous constructivist style of the straight line.

 

In the Nigerian Nsugbe, meanwhile Doris Weller's second home, she learned how to paint the walls of mud huts with chalk and charcoal in bold lines. So she got a feel for the "infinite painting" that is not limited to a picture format but continues cyclically. This technique she  transferred  onto her canvases. The picture edge is virtually eliminated. The in Fürth exhibited paintings also could be considered as a continuous story in pictures.

 

The diverse world, which only at second glance becomes apparent, inspires to explore the picture stories. Where ones own imagination is not enough,  the titles help : "Spirits playground", "The witch's kitchen ", "Force in shadow", "The palm wine drinkers", "Dance of the medicine men," "The rainmaker", "The black royal couple "- a panopticon of life, which to most Europeans is a unfamiliar world, reveals itself here in an entertaining way, often something to chuckle about.

 

To make the West familiar with the art of the Igbo tribe, is also an objective of the 44-year-old artist. Together with her Nigerian partner and with the support of the Foreign Office, in 1992 in Nsugbe was the Ama Dialog Foundation founded, a kind of artistic education centre in which the traditional art of the Igbos is maintained and are regularly international workshops organised.


With the presentation of Weller's pictures in the Hospital was at least in the sense of the patients a happy choice made. Mostly painted in bright colours, the picture stories make cheerful and help temporarily to forget some pain and some anxiety.