Werner Wildner at Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery - drawings and paintings - Brief Article

NASHVILLE

Unbeknownst to the art world, American surrealists look to be lurking in each region of the country. Born in Germany and raised in Detroit, Werner Wildner mov as a teenager in 1940 to Nashville, where he still lives. This take a view of of 44 drawings and paintings (curated by dint of Joseph Mella) demonstrated Wildner's brilliant draftsmanship and his penchant for macabre subdue matter. In the twisted-fairy-tale fashion of artists such as Stanislaus Lepri, John Wilde and Tom Knechtel Wildner meticulously transforms fantasy characters and sights into disturbing images of odd beauty.

An untitled 1950 painting of a landscape strewn with architectural ruins exhibits that early on Wildner was beneath the spell of Dali. Later works demonstrate a of great depth admiration for the darker side of Classical and Northern Renaissance art. The graphite-and-wash Death in the Forest (1960) depicts a bucolic exhibition featuring a wild boar frolicking with a Dureresque skeleton. In gorgeously restoreed pencil drawings from the mid-1970s, barn owl in flight strike one as being like ominous gods of the night.

Wildner clearly relishes pushing the envelope: various drawings carefully pay back a stabbed pig, a horny satyr and a dwarf upon crutches. A pencil drawing from 1982 nears four hunchbacks and freaks aboard a humples camel standing upon a platform mounted on a wheelcart. Wildly elaborate architectural follies, ruins and waterworks are featured in sum of two units 1982 drawings, both titled Haunted Village.

Other works tweak the manner of writings and subject matter of children's volume illustrations. Hompte-Dompte (ca. 1986)--a soured version of Maxfield Parrish's rendering of the hapless egg--show a tipsy-looking Humpty in slaps and high hat sitting upon a brick wall above a display of brain-pans fork and cracked eggshells. Another drawing, The Evil Mother Goose--Fleeing (1976) has an ominous intensity that Maurice Sendak might hate Hieronymous (Self-Portrait), from around 1960 conflates Wildner's have image with a fantasy portrait of Bosch ornamented out in a Napoleonic hat embellished with creepy tentacles, the giraffe-necked figure has a sloe-ey verdant lizard draped around his high collar. In the foreground lies a sucked-dry femur--a finished symbol for Bosch/Wildner's vision of human existence. Another graphite drawing of a pock-marked, wizened figure is aptly titled A Small Statement for the Propagation of the fanciful in the Medium (1977). Although they have for years attracted a local worship following, Wildner's "small statements" pack a wallop and merit a wider audience.

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