Afrikanisches Haus

Afrikanisches Haus is one of a series of paintings made by Weischer in 2000 and 2001 featuring deceptively cheerful, colorfully painted GDR social housing set against fantastical backdrops of yawning deserts or lush green rolling mountains of Africa, light years away from the buildings' urban origins. Here, roses burst from one corner and palm trees sway in another, this incongruous scene apparently saturated with bright sunlight. The rough-hewn blue foreground is more reminiscent of a David Hockney swimming pool than the grey courtyards normally to be found in GDR housing blocks. This overt referencing of iconic works of art, here most specifically those of Hockney, has become a signature of Weischer's artistic practice. Here, he pays homage to Hockney's unique skill at handling of objects in space, but adds his own subversion of this precision, always drawing attention to the paint surface with layers of paint overlapping and areas of the work left apparently unfinished. His composition is infused with a wry, poignant humour. The utopian ideal of these homes as visions of the future and how human beings could interact in a post-war modern world has long since been proved a misguided dream, both of the socially-minded architects in the West, and the equally destructive idealism of post-war Communism in the East. The light in Leipzig, where Weischer studied and now lives, not to mention the reality of these houses as the locus where real people's lives are played out, could not have less in common with the irrepressible and upbeat Californian sunshine and way of life, or the blinding sun of the African plains or desert. The same high-rise buildings exist the world over, but their colourfulness jars in gloomy grey light. Part nod to the graphic style of Social Realist propaganda, and part pictorial yearning for another world with another kind of light, where extremes of climate are the norm, Afrikanisches Haus is both a masterful celebration of painterly techniques and an ironic take on a failed utopia.