Pensive Images
16 Artists in Dialogue with W. G. Sebald

“The Vocation of Saint Matthew”: that is the title that Martin Krug has chosen for his novella, after Caravaggio’s iconic painting at the Church of San Luigi degli Francesi in Rome. The irony is unmistakable—Martin, the protagonist of his narrative, hesitates to accept a promotion: he has been offered the job of his boss, for whose wife, Marion, he has fallen on a shared vacation. Yet Martin’s friend, whom he has asked for advice, proposes a different title: Ghost Story—a key element of the plot is the mysterious Alexander’s disappearance, seemingly forever, in the sea …

Martin’s friend and interlocutor, the novel’s first-person narrator, embeds the novella in a narrative framework that mirrors its motifs: love as passion, eros and sex, loyalty and betrayal, manliness and chivalry, art, film, and music. Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt, glamorously adapted for the silver screen by Jean-Luc Godard, is reread and discussed as a MeToo story.

Martin Krumbholz (b. Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Germany, 1954; lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a writer and theater critic. His first novel, Eine kleine Passion, came out in 2013.

Time, like space, is one of the key coordinates of human existence. The great mysteries of our lives revolve around it, only to remain unresolved when death inevitably ends our days. What is time’s role in art? The vanitas, a genre that was popular with painters in the seventeenth century, is hardly the earliest form that artists have devised to grapple with it. Holger Kube Ventura’s book On Trickling Away. Concepts of Time in Contemporary Art presents the ideas of contemporary artists who approach time from diverse angles. In the twenty-first century, their interest appears to have shifted from visualizations of future raptures to visions of slowness, of the distension, repetition, and standstill of moments in time. Bernard Aubertin (FR), Inge Dick (AT), Rom Gaastra (NL), Gosbert Gottmann (DE), Tommi Grönlund & Petteri Nisunen (FI), Manuela Kasemir (DE), Timo Klos (DE), Dimitry Orlac (FR), George Rickey (US), Patrik Söderlund & Visa Suonpää (FI), and John Woodman (UK) hone our awareness of how subjective the passage of time is and convey vivid experiences of its trickling away.

An artist’s book, an artist’s text

On twenty-two large-format typographic sheets, Thyra Schmidt (b. 1974, Pinneberg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) develops a narrative featuring moments in an amorous relationship. Thoughts and encounters between “her” and “him” are captured in poetically constructed, fragmentary units of meaning. Imaginary images are conjured in the mind’s eye: Close-ups and intimate insights into a delicate web of interpersonal incidents. Personal observations and experiences form the starting point of this artistic exploration of love. Yet the focus of her work is not on autobiographical rendering, but rather on the tracking down of elementary structures, a general understanding of intimacy.