Online exhibition

 

Childhood memories, boyhood dreams, lonesome cowboy ... Peter Sehringer has entered the myth of the Western: open-eyed, unprotected, in the flesh. Immediately as his work affects the viewer, so intensely does the painter engage with his subjects. In his current series, it is the postmodern images of a genre that caused a furor as a founding myth of the USA, later of the free West, then of freedom per se, primarily in film. Peter Sehringer quotes this genre with breathtaking empathy - not that he pays homage to a fiction of Wild West romanticism, no: he puts himself in its visual world. He appropriates them in his characteristic painting style, which shows seemingly distanced situations in stencil-like generality - silhouettes of riders and armed people, anonymous groups of cowboys and Indians, deserted towns, desolate prairie areas. At the same time, these images take possession of him - and of us - precisely because they are already familiar to memory, as if we had once been there. The Wild West is one of the few myths of modern times whose invention teaches us how the sagas must have been created from time immemorial. Created by individuals, generalized for many, accepted as common knowledge, elevated to a world-creating cultural asset, and finally (v)declared to be true events in common images and colocated stories. Postmodern man playfully gets involved in this, but also manages to become part of this event. Thus the painter Peter Sehringer slips into the role of his youthful heroes, rides in the throng of his fictitious comrades through the prairie, watched, perhaps protected by the thunderbirds, Indians who seem to appear out of nowhere and disappear there again. Or he puts himself in the place of that protagonist who, with a casual, even nervous finger on the trigger of his revolver, takes over deserted towns. Sehringer's new paintings represent a high point in the painter's oeuvre. In times of deepest uncertainty and the longing for the familiar, in times of the World Wide Web, which allows unlimited access to the knowledge of the world, i.e. also beyond the individual mind, Peter Sehringer recreates the myth of a "wild", i.e. also unspoiled, rough "Wild West", in which the individual can merge into a generality and yet retain his individuality, in which the artist and the viewer can become one.