Werner Berges (1941 Cloppenburg - 2017 Schallstadt) (F), See me'

acrylic on canvas, 100 cm x 80 cm, signed on verso, no. July 73/456/35 dated and numbered, titled, partly slightly stained, Provenance: Galerie Regio, Freiburg, Exhibitions: 1974 Mannheim (Kunstverein Mannheim), exhibition Werner Berges

Werner Berges was born in Cloppenburg in 1941 and was a German Pop-Art artist who became known for his prints, sculptures and paintings. From 1960 to 1963 he studied commercial art with a focus on fashion design at the Bremen School of Art, which was followed by his studies in free painting at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin. The artist turned to figurative painting, whereby those very figures were initially created from different forms and created an almost surreal impression. In the 1970s, Pop-Art came to the fore and Werner Berges became known for his understanding of this style and its link to advertising, especially for his main motif - the woman. ''A beautiful woman is still for me the most perfect thing I can imagine: The ideal object of art.'' Berges presented the type of woman familiar from advertising, but he removed the advertising figure from its context and presented it to the viewer in a completely new light. In doing so, Berges worked differently from Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who appealed to the collective consciousness and chose pop culture icons for their works. For Berges, the focus was on the anonymous. The work, we are presenting, is titled 'See me' and speaks directly to the viewer, but the stylised young woman depicted cannot be attributed to any real person. Like on the cover of a fashion magazine, the woman adorns the picture, which is set in acrylic on canvas. She is slender, covers her probably free upper body gracefully with her own arms and her long hair blows to the side, her gaze is directed towards the viewer through the colour stripes. Similar to a spectral being, which is composed of pure energy and has no material existence, the woman appears on the canvas between the colour grid. She is not held in place, as she does not draw any outlines around her, but she is visible through the principles of optics. With clear contours, the artist inserts the model into the colour grid and allows the lady to emerge in the gaps of the graphic framework.