Wieland Payer

The Gentleman Explorer is a species which has become scarcetoday. Georg Forster and Alexander von Humboldt were among their firstrepresentatives; dauntless explorers, sophisticated intellectuals and artistsat the same time. They had the ability to discover new territories and todescribe and present them vividly to their contemporaries.They occupied the imagination of entirenations and created ranges of ideas, which lasted for decades.

Wieland Payer is a revenant ofthis visionary and adventurous type of human. His brilliant prints and drawingsrepresent remote landscapes with weird cultures.

His first expedition led him tothe Caucasus Mountains; further journeys disclosed more secluded territory, ofwhich the pausibility increases as the work of the young artist is developing.Some of the continents visited by Payer seem to already have been sighted fromafar and drafted by George Forster. Payer aims “to see and amaze, to observebut primarily to collect and to measure“ as his tutor Uwe Pfeiffer states.

Payer’s latest series “Bondasca“deals with the “Zone“, that mysterious and extraterrestrial area, which isswarmed with marvellous artefacts and deadly traps. Arkadi and Boris Strugatzkidescribed this landscape in their book “Roadside Picnic“, with his movie“Stalker“ Andrej Tarkowski erected a cinematic memorial in its honour in 1978.

Wieland Payer now transposes themesmeric motifs of the Russian master director to Engadin and Bergell, thesetting of the earliest high mountain paintings in art history by thepre-romanticist Caspar Wolf (1735-83).

Payer’s synthesis of ScienceFiction and Romantic perception isn’t a coincidence: The Master thesis of theyoung artist deals with the German Romanticism. The atmospheric density andperfection of his Bondasca series refer to Carl Blechen, its metaphysicalquality to Caspar David Friedrich. The “romantic irony“ isn’t missed outeither: “pioneers“, preposterous crop creatures, which seemingly emanated frompsychedelic visions by lunatic illustrators populate the barren rocky landscapeof the Swiss Alps.

Wieland Payer was born in Erfurtin 1981. He studied at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle,the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and is currently completing his Masters atthe Royal College of Art in London.