G2 Schaulager

D R E A M S  A R E  M Y  R E A L I T Y

Georg Weißbach

 

 

SPECIAL EXHIBITION
G2 Schaulager

May, 16 – August 24, 2025
Opening: Thursday, May, 15, 2025, 5 – 8 pm

 

 

With DREAMS ARE MY REALITY, G2 presents a solo exhibition by Leipzig artist Georg Weißbach (*1987). Weißbach poses questions about the artist’s existence, success and failure, and the accompanying doubt and hope. He interweaves text and visual elements into multifaceted allegories about life, drawing from the rich spectrum between pop culture and art history. His painterly positions are complemented by a video work and an installation.

In the work Logical, Weißbach focuses on the symbolic power and interpretive potential of fonts and graphic forms. A circle stands out against a red background, framed by a snail-shaped, interrupted meander ornament. Within this circle, the word Logical appears in black on a white background. The term is originally associated with rational conclusions and the study of logic. In contemporary everyday language, however, logical often means “of course,” “naturally,” or “obviously”—an expression that leaves no room for doubt. Weißbach employs the characteristic typeface of the Asterix comics, lending the word a playful dimension charged with historical and pop-cultural references. By painterly processing the typeface and embedding it in an ancient formal language, he counters the fleeting nature of digital or printed text and preserves it in contrast to the flood of text on the internet. Weißbach’s work repeatedly oscillates between abstraction and figuration.

In the work Emotionally Intense (The Painting is the More Beautiful Thinking), a pink structure of interconnected lines lies on a black background, with circles of oil paint sitting on and within it. Weißbach plays with the reduction of design elements to their minimum, provoking figurative interpretations. The depiction, with its branching line structure and colorful circles, quickly evokes a Christmas tree with baubles or the budding blossoms of trees and plants in spring. Another possible reading is that of a schematic representation of the daily decision-making choices that everyone, but especially artists, face. Neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian from the University of Cambridge estimates that each person makes around 35,000 decisions per day, many of them subconsciously. If one suppresses the urge to compare the depicted with the known world, the work ultimately reveals itself as a portrait of the essence of painting itself: color. Weißbach applies it in pure form, thickly, creating an erratic surface that casts shadows and occupies the canvas like foreign bodies.

Time and again, Weißbach asks fellow artists to give him their failed works—paintings that would not leave the studio in that state. He then overpaints them with his own works. An example in this exhibition is the work GOOD TIMES BAD TIMES. The layers of paint from the original work form relief-like structures on the canvas. The artist clearly references the popular German soap opera of the same name. On another level, the antithesis can be related to the duality of life between good and bad. Failure becomes a concept in Weißbach’s work, manifesting error-making as collective behavior essential to the artist’s existence and serving as fertile ground for something new.

On the balcony of the storage gallery stands an air dancer, also known as a tubeman. These textile sculptures, which emerged in the 1990s for advertising purposes, gained widespread popularity, especially in the USA. The figures flail wildly, then collapse, exhausted, only to be revived by the next gust of wind to perform their ecstatic dance. Between energetic outbursts and powerless exhaustion, the tubeman unwittingly stages a performance as a parable of life between euphoria and lethargy.
Weißbach uses the same work for a site-specific video piece in which the artist stands in the exhibition space in front of the air dancer, performing the aria Lascia ch’io pianga from George Friderich Handel’s opera Rinaldo (1685–1759) on his trumpet. Here, the artist becomes the protagonist while simultaneously documenting his existence as an artist. Once again, Weißbach playfully depicts the struggle with and against his own work. The tubeman disrupts the performance with loud wind and fabric noises, approaching the artist with hectic, violent movements. The artist struggles, or rather plays, against it. However, the tubeman is not merely an antagonist. In randomly occurring situations where Weißbach’s movements and those of the air dancer synchronize, the work and the artist harmonize in a symbiotic unity.
Like a billboard in an urban space, eight vertical works combine to form a large-scale format. Weißbach employs the picture-in-picture principle, presenting a variety of scenes that draw on a wide range of visual human expressions. These range from stylized figure depictions reminiscent of early human cave paintings, to 20th-century comic references like Charlie Brown from Peanuts, to the pop culture of the 1990s and 2000s in the form of tribal tattoos, a popular motif among teenagers that is regaining popularity today amid the revival of early 2000s fashion. The collage-like entanglement of painterly image and text elements creates a multifaceted associative landscape from the recurring elements of Weißbach’s oeuvre.

OPENING HOURS
(only through public tours):
Wed.: 6 – 7 pm / Fri. – Sun.: 3 – 4 pm