In this volume, Thilo Westermann presents reproductions of his colored pencil drawings and reverse glass paintings at their original size. Detailed close-ups are carefully scaled to match the proportions and dot structure of the large-format unique prints that the artist derives from his reverse glass paintings.
The book also features Westermann’s digitally composed photomontages. These works engage in a subtle dialogue with actual installation photographs, blurring the boundary between authentic exhibition views and digitally constructed imagery.
In addition to the visual material, Thilo Westermann Vanitas includes essays by Martin Thierer, Christin Müller, and Aoife Rosenmeyer, offering critical perspectives on Westermann’s practice and situating it within broader art-historical and theoretical contexts. Designed by the artist himself, this artist’s book serves as both a visual and conceptual reflection on his own œuvre.
Thilo Westermann Vanitas
VfmK Verlag für Moderne Kunst (Vienna)
English/German
168 pages, hardcover
13 × 9.8 in | 33 × 25 cm
ISBN: 978-3-86984-503-6
Contributors: Martin Thierer, Christin Müller, Aoife Rosenmeyer
"The small format, gleaming surface and plasticity of the image medium create works that have the feel of sculptures about them; each image appears as a consequence to be a precious gem, a piece of jewelry, that in the past would surely have found its way into one of the cabinets of curiosities. [...] The fragile blossoms and gleaming vases depicted are ideal compositions that Westermann has perfected down to the minutest details. The compositions seem like three-dimensional objects encased in glass—inaccessible and illustrious, which immediately suggests the use of the term hyperrealism. In so doing Westermann not only rivals photography, but most certainly also competes with the idealizing aesthetic of the now technically perfected modern image production per se. He creates tromp-l’œils, not just of photographic images, but of the entire technical process connected to them […].“ (Martin Thierer)
"[…] the distance between his [Thilo Westermann’s] eyes and the emerging image is only 10 – 15 centimeters. At this distance the painting is larger than life and develops a life of its own. […] As if one steps closer to the paintings, the intrinsic life of the images becomes comprehensible in the large-sized unique prints. Thilo Westermann has his reverse glass paintings enlarged such that the painted motif takes on a life of its own when seen from the customary distance taken by viewers. The dots of the images can thus be discerned as non-machine-made, imperfect and irregular, placed there by the individual movement of a hand. The degree of enlargement is carefully chosen. The artist has chosen the ratio of enlargement such that the image flips from showing a recognizable theme and abstraction into a non-figurative blur of image dots. The viewer’s perception is thus undermined: With each step forward toward the exhibition walls the flowers increasingly dissolve and details emerge until at some point all you see is dots. With each step back, the subject matter re-assembles itself and resembles the original image, the small-sized reverse glass painting." (Christin Müller)
"Westermann’s works are informed by a culture in which images are both fleeting and of paramount importance. The media we are continually fed require a continual stream of images both glossy and beautiful, even if they are destined to disappear as fast as they appear. These images are the manifestation of economies of desire, and must be continually renewed and bettered. Thilo Westermann is attuned to the languages of attraction but resists the imperative to make evanescent images. And thus he is thoroughly contemporary, working in but at a remove from his time. If the great still lives of the Baroque period celebrated the perfection and the fleeting duration of all that is worldly, Westermann reconsiders that period as a means to hold fast to something lasting while all around him is fleeting. As Agamben put it: 'It is as if this invisible light that is the darkness of the present cast its shadow on the past, so that the past, touched by this shadow, acquired the ability to respond to the darkness of the now.'" (Aoife Rosenmeyer)
