Reiner Wagner

About the artist

Reiner Wagner was born in Hildesheim in 1942. Coming from a family of musicians, he learnt to play the violin as a child, then the piano and sang in a boys' choir. In 1957, during a holiday on the island of Corsica, he discovered his love of painting. After finishing school, Wagner finally decided against a career as a musician and studied from 1961 to 1964, first at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (under Hermann Kasper) and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. In 1965, Wagner moved to Corsica with his wife Ingrid, where he created his first landscape paintings of the Mediterranean island. After the birth of their first son, Wagner first moved to Munich, then to Lake Starnberg when their second son was born. A friendly relationship developed with Galerie Günther Franke, Munich, which represented the artist from 1972-1977, with Galerie Gunzenhauser, Munich, which exhibited Wagner from 1978-2001 and looked after his work (1996 catalogue raisonné, 1965-1995), and then from 1989 with Galerie Koch in Hanover. Wagner's first museum exhibition took place in 1979 at the Weilheim City Museum (also 1981, 1992, 2002), followed by exhibitions at the Schongau City Museum (1990, 1994). To this day, Wagner regularly shows his works at the Galerie Koch in Hanover. - Wagner's work includes oil paintings, watercolours and woodcuts of landscapes and still lifes. His landscapes always reflect his living environment, on the one hand the Bavarian Alpine foothills from Lake Starnberg southwards towards the towns of Iffeldorf, Kochel, Murnau with their lakes, moors and the Bavarian Alps, from the Walchensee mountains and Walchensee via Krün, Wallgau to the Karwendel mountains, and on the other hand the western Corsican, Mediterranean mountain landscape with the sea, which the painter still visits in the summer months. Wagner's landscapes, although orientated towards visible reality, are by no means vedute, but reduce the nature seen to its essential forms, reflecting its atmospheric mood as well as the painter's own experience, his dialogue with nature. Wagner's landscapes often consist of clearly separated landscape zones, sometimes layered parallel to one another in the painting. The colour palette is reduced to a few colours, even concentrating on just one colour in various shades of light and dark (e.g. Walchensee pictures). The renunciation of details, the tendency to combine diversity into a few large areas and the reduction of the richness of colour simplify and abstract the natural model, allowing the eye to linger. Impressions such as seriousness, calm, inwardness, loneliness, emptiness, but also cheerfulness and clarity are part of his landscape paintings.
Although people are absent from Reiner Wagner's landscapes, he does not show unspoilt nature. Paths, barns, farmsteads and boathouses, which the artist reduces to their basic forms, bear witness to the presence of man. With their red, orange-red, blue or violet colouring, the roofs of the barns often form a clear colour accent in the composition, sometimes complementing the green of the flora or the blue of the sky and the mountains; a creative intervention in the topographically given, which underlines the fact that Wagner's landscape paintings are not an image of what he has seen, but a mental processing of what he has seen. This also characterises Wagner's still lifes, which show objects from his immediate living and working environment: Cups, bowls and plates, fruit, individual flowers in often glass vessels as well as the painter's working materials, paint tubes, chalks, paint tins and brushes. The creative impulse is usually triggered by a random constellation of these objects, but his still lifes are also strictly composed and characterised by the same asceticism as his landscape paintings. Only a few objects occupy the compositions; they are displayed in an intimate, spaceless manner. The viewer's gaze can rest entirely on the individual objects; their presentation surfaces and the background are usually almost monochrome. The outlines of the slightly abstractly depicted objects are firm and clearly contoured, their colours bright, detached from the original colour of the object and set in relation to the colour tones of the surface and background. It is clear that Wagner does not strive for mimesis in his still lifes either, but instead achieves a different, new creation by mentally processing what he has seen. It is not without reason that a conversation with Reiner Wagner in 2006 was introduced with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's aphorism: "Art: another nature, also mysterious, but more comprehensible; for it springs from the mind."