Rainer Fetting

Rainer Fetting Infanta Margarita, Velázquez Inspiration 1996 Oil on canvas 270 x 190 cm. Signed, dated and titled on the reverse of the canvas 'Infanta Margarita Velazquez Inspiration Fetting 96' and with work number, material and dimensions. - With traces of studio. Provenance Gallery Tammen & Busch, Berlin; private collection, Hesse Exhibitions Berlin 1996 (Galerie Tammen & Busch), Willy Brandt, the sculpture by Rainer Fetting, Ausst.Kat., p.73 with color ill. Already during his work on the portrait sculpture of Willy Brandt in 1996, Rainer Fetting dealt with the multi-layered political and personal circumstances of this commission in an intensive process. The same immersion in a given theme and its reinterpretation is also required by Fetting's painterly exploration of "Las Meninas," the famous painting by Diego Velázquez in the Prado, which follows this commissioned work. "It is [...] the attempt to formulate the present out of history by making present positions so blatant that the future can emerge. The past is not the discarded and dead, but the explosive from which innovations and utopias can emerge - not just an aesthetic experience. [...] Here, too, Fetting creates metamorphoses, changes, he takes up something that has been shaped by another in order to be able to become an image anew as both agent and movens at the same time in the more subjective, more individual visual language of the artist from Berlin." (Dieter Ronte, Rainer Fetting, Willy Brandt, Die Skulptur, Ausst.Kat. Galerie Tammen & Busch, Berlin 1996, o.p.). In this series of works, the artist alienates the figures of the painting model by applying the sweeping hoop skirts and the backgrounds as diffuse color surfaces and partly inscribing his own person or Berlin city motifs in the portraits. Offered here is a monumental portrait of the Infanta Margarita, whose dress is covered with white veils, color dominated by intense red tones.