Marcus Weber: Krazy Dog Moon Kat (Kat. Villa Merkel, Galerien der Stadt Esslingen)

The book on the occasion of Marcus Weber’s exhibition KRAZY DOG MOON KAT presents for the first time a wide selection of paintings by the artist, who was born in Stuttgart in 1965 and now lives in Berlin. They are narrative tongue-in-cheek images, allusive group portraits, and urban land­scapes with grotesque re-wordings of social ­orders, along with caricatured and exaggerated individual characters. There are flashes of painterly sophistication, so that some works may be read as a ­capriccio, desolate, and romantic at the same time. Marcus Weber displays an unmistakable enthusiasm for ­artists like James Ensor and Philip Guston. All in all, this creates a grotesque mixture mocking each and every hierarchy, based as much on ­productive bridging into the realm of comics by Georg Herriman as it is on art history. Weber is a genre painter in the best tradition, who paints images of society. Unconventional communities are moved into focus: isolated men at bar counters, characters reading art magazines, people slouching in design furniture, and café house scenes where masked people gather together. As a subtle and multi-layered reaction to current political and social conditions, these works rival so called new history painting, which is usually exhausted by painted copies of press photos. Accordingly, the New York Times, on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in the United States, attributed to the artist a surprisingly up-to-date ­approach in his emulation of the immutability of real life.