Born in 1973 in Elte, Westphalia. Lives and works in Leipzig.

Rooms devoid of people—inside a house or embedded in a landscape—are the primary theme in the works of Matthias Weischer, who gained an international reputation at a very early stage in his career. Even before he completed his studies at the Academy of Visual Arts (HGB) in Leipzig, from which he graduated as a master student of Sighard Gille in 2003, his works were being presented in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad. This was followed by various prizes, awards, and scholarships, including a work grant at the renowned Villa Massimo in Rome (2007).

In 2002, together with several former classmates, he co-founded the artist-run gallery Liga in Berlin. The rather heterogeneous group of young artists soon established itself under the label of the “New Leipzig School.” After two years, Weischer returned to Leipzig and moved into a studio in the “Baumwollspinnerei,” an old industrial cotton mill, which remains his work base to this day.

In his paintings, which are included in numerous private and public collections, Weischer creates collage-like, at times rather bleak and even depressing interiors, filled with objects that seem familiar from one’s own living environment, but that appear alien and out of place in this context. Emotions and memories are evoked, but remain indefinite. What do the furnishings of a room reveal about its function? What do objects say about their presumed owner? Weischer’s complex picture-puzzles are stage-like, whereby the main roles are played not by people, but rather by objects: things that are at times completely banal, and at other time symbolically charged, and appear to have been borrowed from an antiques shop or the pool of art history. It is thus not surprising that, in the past few years, Weischer has also worked in the theater as a set designer.

 

Weischer also always makes the object nature of his paintings themselves the theme of his works by blurring the boundaries between representational and abstract painting and also integrating sculptural elements. Time and again, illusionistic space is thus sensitively disrupted. Weischer’s interiors are not self-contained peep-show pictures, but rather intelligent mental games referring back to the medium of painting itself.