Willem Weismann Presents Basement Odyssey Paintings At London’s Zabludowicz Collection

Willem Weismann has produced an ambitious suite of new paintings for his exhibition ‘Basement Odyssey’ at the Zabludowicz Collection in London. The show takes the viewer on a journey through layers of space, time and meaning. Weismann installed a large triptych of canvases which flow around the walls of the room, responding to the proportions of the gallery and to the building’s past life as a church. 

The idea of discovering what lies behind facades or beneath our feet is a central motif of Weismann’s work. When viewed in sequence the paintings move from an exterior view of a street to the inside of a mysterious blue-bricked building, down into a basement space where concrete floors dissolve into lava, revealing fossilised bones, palm trees and suits of armour. Andrea Mantegna’s Renaissance masterpiece The Triumphs of Caesar (c.1484-92), on view at Hampton Court Palace, is a particular inspiration, with Weismann wryly channeling this grand work to produce his own version of a visual “shaggy dog story”.

This spatial and narrative device used within the paintings references comic book panels and cinema, in particular, extensive panning shots as pioneered by Orson Welles in films such as Touch of Evil. A further influence, from Weismann’s own youth, are 1980s adventure video games. The first painting in the triptych is loosely inspired by the post-apocalyptic game Manhunter: New York which features a nightclub called “Wretched Excess”. Parallels between Weismann’s paintings and video games can be felt in the way characters move through spaces, and how connections are suggested through the arrangement of symbolic objects as if they were clues in some kind of larger puzzle. Weismann explores the possibilities of painting to be a store of meaning with parallels to other forms of physical and virtual archives and to be a surface on which we might wrestle with making sense of a world in flux.

When describing his ideas for the exhibition Weismann says: “I think it’s fascinating how we are continuously walking on top of the entire history of the world. As if you could go back to the beginning of time if you just keep digging. For me, this thought refers to the chaos or mess that is hidden underneath the relatively smooth surface of our pavements and lawns.”

Willem Weismann (b. Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 1977) has been living in London since 2003. He studied at Arnhem Institute for the Arts, the Netherlands 1997-2002, and Goldsmiths College 2003-2004. He won the East London Painting Prize in 2015. Weismann has had solo shows at Cabin Gallery, London, The Nunnery gallery, London, Galeria Quadrado Azul, Porto and Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem. Recent group exhibitions include Summer Show, Turps Gallery, London and Secret European Studio at ArthouSE1, London.

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