Even as abstract expressionism still reigned supreme internationally, numerous artists in Great Britain and the USA began returning to an art that was figurative and self-reflective, in the process tearing down the traditional boundaries between high art and everyday culture with ironic abandon. With sights set on a democratic ideal, their interest was in everyday images of industrialized, urban, and commercialized society as it existed during the post-war economic boom. It was through his pioneering innovation of appropriating the new and aggressive pictorial language of popular culture, advertising, and cartoons that Lichtenstein helped pop art achieve its breakthrough in 1961. He rejected the pathos of subjective expressivity in art with his meticulous manner of painting that aimed to mimic trivial comic book motifs. To his mind, the flood of images subject to purely commercial considerations, oriented toward mass-market tastes, and optimized by graphic designers, advertising professionals, company executives, and perceptual psychologists conveyed the essence of his times. In an always lovingly ironic way that took on an increasingly critical tone as time went by, he dedicated his life as an artist to the investigation of the aesthetic values and established clichés of contemporary consumer culture’s imagery as shaped by commercialization and industrialization. The ambivalence between high and low art, between artist and machine, between original and copy, and between artwork and reproduction is the overarching theme of his oeuvre.

Its absolute silence and the suppression of all outside influences that might help the brain to regenerate cannot be withstood for prolonged periods of time. With his choice of motifs, Willikens reflects the coldness, oppressiveness, and cruelty that emanate from facilities of confinement.

Carceri – Archaeology of Silence

The depopulated oeuvre of Ben Willikens, the legendary rector of Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts and a master of the aesthetics of empty spaces, captivates us with its astonishing coldness. The artist’s large-format paintings, which for the most part depict strictly composed spaces devoid of human beings, netted him equal measures of fame and unmistakability during the second half of the 1970s. Willikens, born in Leipzig in 1939, was beset in 1969 by a deep emotional crisis that resulted in a oneyear stay at a psychiatric institution. The artist subsequently went on to process this drastic experience in acrylic paintings done mostly in large formats. Created between 1970 and 1981, they show various indoor spaces: bedrooms, hallways, washrooms. Even though these institutional paintings do without human beings, it is indeed the individual that stands at the center—reflected by precisely those objects that serve to confine him. His recently created series Carceri – Archäologie des Schweigens [Prisons – Archaeology of Silence] was inspired by the writings of Michel Foucault. In a total of 16 paintings, Willikens takes up his pictorial subjects of the 1970s and develops them further: the rooms of the institution are now entered, with their furnishings rendered near-unrecognizable by the consistent enlargement of objects such as beds, lamps, and washing facilities. It is once again oppressive spaces that the artist has created, here—a prison of the soul, inhabited by a meditative silence that allows for existential statements about the darkest human abysses.

Obersalzberg

There can be no doubt that Ben Willikens’ selection of motifs and their modes of depiction relates closely to events in his life: in December of 1943, when he was just four years old, Willikens was traumatized by the bombardment of his home town of Leipzig. He then lost both his father and his sister just a few years later. But even so, his works’ relevance extends far beyond his own biography. The icy cold of the institutional paintings that made Willikens famous can also be found in his late oeuvre—such as in the shuddering glance cast through a window of Hitler’s “Berghof” vacation residence on the Obersalzberg. Such paintings show the aesthetics of evil in its banality, and the cruelty of emptiness is what lends these works, as well, their special power. It is particularly spaces associated with power that interest the artist. Power, however, is nothing that he would worship or admire. Quite the contrary: in his works, power appears as the expression of a defeat of humanity, as a manifestation of oppression. His spaces of power represent metaphors for that bestiality that he so despises in the “Third Reich.”