Young Baroque

Excerpts from the catalog text "15 Years Foyer for Young Art. Vereins und Westbank," Hamburg 2000

Unlike some of his peers, Wolf von Waldow is a young artist who very consciously engages with art history… Such references rarely appear as direct quotations, yet in rhythm and opulence… the spirit of Baroque complexity is present in Wolf von Waldow’s work. The Baroque… was one of the last attempts to grasp the world as a unified whole: the rational side of its overflowing forms is Diderot’s highly systematic encyclopedia. Such titanic efforts to comprehend the world are still relevant today, one thinks of the equally heroic attempt to document everything and everyone on the worldwide… Internet. In Wolf von Waldow’s largest work, Home, a net full of apples plays a central role—and apples, of course, are the legendary fruits of knowledge…

Hypertext
Wolf von Waldow’s work resists a single, definitive reading. It may contain a personal… subtext, but it primarily operates through the addition and layering of traditional visual symbols: cited symbols and emblems are condensed into new allegories, which are currently charged with ambiguity, oscillating between historical systems of meaning and contemporary pop culture. Perhaps it is his family history that makes Wolf von Waldow never perceive the chain of tradition as boring or broken. And it certainly doesn’t hurt if a contemporary artist recognizes that advertising symbols—whether in supermarkets, on travel websites, or in subcultural flyers—often reference older, pre-existing visual motifs. Before Wolf von Waldow’s constructed emblems, one is reminded of the “wandering images” studied by the great cultural historian Aby Warburg. The quotation of everyday cultural elements makes his luminous paintings, large-scale installations, and laser-cut cabinet pieces appear friendly and somehow familiar… Multiple layers of access are possible; there is no singular, hermetically sealed world to decipher like a rebus.

Home
The large work Home was installed in the center of a church in Copenhagen. This context suits the allegorical pavilion, crowned by an eagle, with its abundance of designed and found images oscillating between fertility and transience. Isn’t it a complex allegory for the tragic toil of life? Inside, a living-room wall captures the small story of one’s own life in souvenirs and photographs, allowing the viewer to sit before these trophies and idylls as if on a throne. Outside, soldiers labor heroically to the point of death, casting a net to capture life’s meaning and great world events. And yet, as history repeatedly shows, they will personally fall and freeze into facade-decorating herms, merely serving as decoration for shifting, grand state ideals. Such an interpretation transforms this rather playful showpiece into a miniature model of the world.

The Amber Room, VI
In the five-part tableau Amber Room, divided twice by color like an old government corridor, numerous parallel narratives converge in Part 6. This image was created after a summer visit to Auschwitz, a place overlaid after fifty years with much that does little to clarify the experience of its past horrors. On this anti-illusionistic painting, Wolf von Waldow combined a biblical quotation with the neat order of Hitler postage stamps and the employment office logo, warning of new totalitarian horizons, added the escape dream of a tropical island, integrated associations with the environmental movement and nuclear power, and finally garnished the whole with the emblem of a misunderstood revolutionary movement of terrorists… In this way, the abundance of totalitarian desire-horizons turns into a humane appeal to recognize their deadly futility.

Too much? No, no one can be spared from finding their own position amid the complex interconnections of world history without the comfort of an absolute explanation – and in doing so, recognizing how relative it is.