Sven Weigle brings new life to acrylic paint with artwork that doesn’t play by any of the medium’s usual rules. Weigle’s textures are some of the most unusual being created in painting today. He uses deep, often pure colors and applies them in thick brushstrokes that break and fade almost like a print would. He seemingly does not take advantage of the paint’s liquid nature, but lays each color on in its individual space. The result is a composition both streamlined and thought-provoking. The eye instinctively works to fill in the gaps on the canvas, to make up for non-existent shadows and highlights, and to imagine what these textures could possibly look like in real life.
Weigle’s work exists at an interesting intersection of figurative and non-representational art. The human body is certainly a key subject for him, and he depicts it in all kinds of context: full figural studies, details of just a person’s hands, and even close-up portraits of the face. But even when the figure is the main component, all of these works also have a vibrant patterned background that engages in a push and pull with its human companion. Weigle draws his figures with extremely simplified, clean black outlines, and they are all transparent, allowing the background to shine through. The bodies toe the line of almost becoming a two-dimensional, pared-down pattern themselves. This both highlights the pattern element by comparison, and echoes it visually. Weigle also creates works that are purely non-representational clouds of texture and repetitions of line. These are skillfully composed to ensure that they are no less focused than his figurative work.
Weigle was born in Wuppertal, Germany and today works as an artist and designer. Among the GraficArt with the various picture elements, particularly the stickframe has become his trademark. He has exhibited widely in the United States and is one of the founders of the art label WeigleArt.
www.weigleart.com
www.Agora-Gallery.com/Artistpage/Sven_Weigle.aspx