Urban Zellweger

In the past, Urban has exhibited paintings aflit with voluptuously ass-ish butterflies in coito, others in which figures (markedly headless) waned to wan outline are restored to parodic dimensionality in a gesture of meaty disegno, in still others a hairless dog is perplexingly hybridized with a human torso – joined to it perpendicularly at the neck- a centaur drawn without visual aid from a rather lacking verbal account, maybe. At first blush these procedures and attitudes seem surreal in the narrowest descriptive sense: presenting the fleshy distortions and distentions, the bodily fragmentation, transposition, and coadunation, and rampant anthropomorphism most readily associated with the term. This can be felt even in the opalescent color that floats across the paintings like oil pools on the surface of bad consommé. But, most central of all to such a reading is the prototypically psychoanalytic gesture, often employed by the artist, of obscuring colorful acrylic underpainting with translucent white oil. Here and there this is literalized as snow, though why it is snow and not dirt from which these forms and figures are to be turned from their interment is not entirely clear.

Despite all this, to classify these paintings in this way would be a disservice. They are not the results of the natural outworking of psychic forces. Rather, a surreal vocabulary is only deployed to demonstrate that its claims are themselves the domain of fantasy. Viewed through this lens, the repeated veiling of motifs behind Urban’s characteristic white oil signals a desire to fabricate a sorely-missed unconscious. Like the Piltdown Man, things are buried only so that they might be dug up later and called ancient. When we look at Urban’s pictures, which by all appearances should be reflections of an internal life, the pleasure we obtain is in pretending we recognize ourselves in them, which is to say, in pretending we have an internal life at all. In every dream home, a heartache.

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In a small untitled drawing from 2015, Urban rendered in pen and oil the covers of an open book, superimposed over a face and through which covers the eyes of this face can be seen. The transparency of the book in this way grants us visual access not only to what it would otherwise obscure, but also to the visual perspective of the book itself, which sees the face of its reader. We might imagine a similar work in

which the words on the pages could themselves be seen, only reversed. If such a drawing were to be placed in front of a mirror, we would be able to read these words in its surface, which is to say assume yet another perspective: that of the reader himself.
Text by Hardy Hill

Urban Zellweger practice comprises of paintings and drawings. Zellweger carves out a body of work that counterbalances reality and mystification in paintings with a quiet layered sobriety. He paints enigmatic images with a deft, cartoon – Expressionist touch.

The fantasies he creates build on the modern utopia and its aftermath and, at the same time, purport a playfulness that is humorous and irreverent. His work wants his view to consider their relationship to the physical world, where texture and surface become crucial elements.