Stefan à Wengen - works : B. Knaus Fine Art

Original Guru

Each work of the series "Original Guru" is named after the title of the series, a monogram and a year. One may get the impression, that they have seen some of these gentlemen before, but the title of the paintings does not help to identify the person.

For many centuries, the task of the painted portrait was to document the person depicted in an identifiable way, to make him or her a remembered person in the first place through the image. Today, photography has largely taken over this task. This confronts painting with the question of whether it has become obsolete, or whether it can convey something beyond depictability. Stefan à Wengen confronts this question in this series. For these works, he first collaged photographs and then recast them in paintings: The natural person of the sitter thus has been more and more alienated towards the final portrait. Throughout the process of painting, à Wengen has not only created a new person, he has allowed a new original to emerge from a falsification, thus exploring the possibilities and varieties of painting in itself. More