The artist is always present at this exhibition. You can meet Rudi Hurzlmeier in flesh and blood again and again in the Buchheim Museum until September 25, when he continues to work on an unfinished work there. On the remaining days, his deputy greets visitors at the entrance to the special exhibition “The wide field of unreasonableness”: The master of comic art sits as a cardboard companion in an “ultralight sculpture” made by Siegfried Böttcher in the cockpit of a chubby sports plane or “space glider”, who is being pursued by a huge fly in front of a typical Hurzlmeier mountain landscape.
But this is supposed to be the only joke that is revealed here – no matter how much the author is urged to retell individual gags in order to show the absurd comedy of the pictures and of the entire show. Because it is important to let the visitors have as much of the attraction of self-discovery as possible, so as not to cheat them and the artist out of laughter. The entire universe of Hurzlmeier’s humor can hardly be opened up with selective quotations: it ranges from subtle to brutal, from amiable to malicious, from ambiguous heartiness to bizarre horror scenarios.
The pig, whose picture bears the title “Eberhard”, seems content.
(Photo: Franz Xaver Fuchs)
How could this painting of an alpinist be called anything other than “Markus”.
(Photo: Franz Xaver Fuchs)
With this landscape image, the caricaturist addresses the topic of “mission deaths”.
(Photo: Franz Xaver Fuchs)
In any case, with this third exhibition as part of the “Komische Kunst” series at the start of the Bernried Humor Festival 2022, museum director Daniel Schreiber has achieved a great success. Hurzlmeier is far more than a caricaturist or buffoon, one can easily attribute cultural-historical significance to him. Together with Michael Sowa and Ernst Kahl, a kind of art form was created on the deck of the satirical magazine “Titanic”, which satirically quotes classical and conservative-looking painting or alienates it with caricaturistic elements.
Each of the three pioneers uses their own stylistic devices. In this triumvirate, Hurzlmeier took over, among other things, the satirization of old masters of all epochs. Nothing and nobody is safe from his irony: Rembrandt’s man with a gold helmet, Caspar David Friedrich, Francois Boucher, Vincent van Gogh, Franz Marc. Hurzlmeier even pays tribute to US underground comic artist Robert Crumb (“Fritz the Cat”) in “Thanksgiving”. Perhaps there is a deeper kinship – in any case, the native of Lower Bavaria also started to draw as a cartoonist, at the beginning of the 1980s for the Munich city newspaper. In addition, both reveal a pronounced penchant for the grotesque and occasionally the obscene – and cultivate a preference for voluminous female soft parts in their subjects.
Some of the images radiate something unsettling
Admittedly, Hurzlmeier’s works have evolved from line drawings to technically mature paintings, and the closeness to the Surrealists and especially to Rene Magritte can often be clearly felt in them. “He puts things together that don’t fit together,” says Schreiber about Hurzlmeier. His work shows “what art can achieve in the best sense: breaking conventions”. Quite a few images also radiated something unsettling, such as the absurd visions of the future that the artist creates under the pseudonym Nic Schultz. Of course, the monumental “St. Vitus Dance at the Prince of Darkness” seems the most uncanny. It is the largest picture ever to be seen in the Buchheim Museum. And “The wide field of unreasonableness” can come up with another superlative: with more than 20 works, it is the largest Hurzlmeier retrospective that has ever existed, according to Schreiber.
In addition, the artist largely conceived and staged this exhibition himself, as the formal curator Reinhard Wittmann and chairman of the Forum Humor revealed at the press conference: “Hurzlmeier is the ideal partner who converts his own ideas into productions”. In order to support the effect of the pictures, the artist uses the spatial experience, the seven departments – “Arkadia”, “Mysteries”, “Visions”, “Visages” as well as “Kindergarten”, “Tiergarten” and “Lustgarten” – are with different colors marked. Hurzlmeier even added the captions himself, and on this occasion he sometimes renames a work. While Schreiber and Wittmann are still providing information to the media representatives, the artist is already out and about in the museum to add a few brush strokes to the “St. Vitus Dance…” or quickly set up a sculpture as a comic commentary on global warming.
The nose is clearly the focus of the picture “Gottschi”, which can also be seen in the large exhibition.
(Photo: Franz Xaver Fuchs)
Visitors to the exhibition who feel inspired to be creative will have the opportunity to decorate Hurzlmeier’s “Hirameki” leaves at a painting table. This painting technique, invented together with Günter Mayer, is based on apparently accidental splashes of color, from which figures can be brought to life with just a few strokes and a lot of imagination. On the exhibition weekends, Hirameki workshops for children and adults take place in the “Laboratory of Imagination”. On June 18th and 19th, the program features music cabaret with David Berlinghof, who enriches the Hurzlmeier show with a sound installation that primarily takes up the animal motifs in the work of this master of the absurd.
A severed finger here, a pair of shoes behind a curtain there, and again and again cucumbers or squirrels: there are endless details to discover in the vast field of unreasonableness. In and with this unique exhibition you can have a lot of fun for many hours – precisely because Rudi Hurzlmeier is not just a joker, but also skilfully plays with the abysmal and the high art.