Till Megerle
Sprechstunde
Nov 22nd, 2024 – Jan 3rd, 2025
Caprii, Düsseldorf
Text
Ariane Müller
Till Megerle has lived in Vienna for some time now. He studied in Vienna at a historically protected academy with skylit studios and centuries-old wooden tribunes in the drawing hall, where he now also teaches and paces up and down the steps during the evening life drawing sessions—an exercise practiced in more or less the same way for the last 300 years, in which students equipped with wooden drawing boards sketch models posed on a central pedestal. The drawings in this show were made in a classic prewar apartment building with high ceilings, few rooms, and parquet floors well-trodden by generations of complete strangers, which nobody right now could afford, much like the high ceilings that no contemporary owner could build, while the often makeshift bathrooms were only installed much later on. Their original absence points to another necessary social aspect of these homes, that is to a different way of dealing with the body and the specifically cultural aspect of—that terrible word—cleanliness, with all the bodily nooks and crannies it entails. All this in Vienna, where only a few architectural styles managed to make themselves at home, mostly those that emphasize the horizontal; a city where the Protestant conception of work never really took hold and nothing that one might call youth culture ever really took off. In this context, we must surmise that Till Megerle isn’t really sketching his surroundings, nor are his drawings based on them; rather they’re drawn from something that he remembers, something that he is. Here, we can also follow the clues implicit in his method and see the collage of photography—his original background—and drawing and gouache as the drawing of a real image, the photograph, expanded into a spatiotemporal hypothesis of a larger, indeterminate space, which notes everything that comes to mind in relation to this photograph in addition to its manifest image. Color, scale, the density of the air, temperature, wind, and the melancholy that lies in not knowing the significance of the photographic image, which stems from the greater problem of memory in general. Was the person we remember eternally smiling in some photograph actually happy? Questions such as these.
Everything recognizable in these images seems profoundly German to the Viennese and thus also to the author, though it may not appear to German viewers as specifically such. Because that’s probably what’s so special about them—something you carry so deeply within yourself that it’s hard to recognize it at all. Since the early 1990s, the international art world has paid special attention to such specifically German details, which went hand in hand with reunification and the rise of Germany as a sovereign state, independent of its post-World War II alliances, East and West. The boom of the so-called Leipzig School could be similarly explained in relation to widespread international curiosity about the new image of Germany. Around the same time, and I think for the first time since 1945 and the subsequent internationalization of German art, artists in West Germany started exploring the spiritual, psychological, and emotional dimensions of the landscapes and colors into which they had been born. This sense of the canny and uncanny, homely and openly grotesque aspects of Germanness can be found in the works of artists such as Kai Althoff, Michaela Eichwald, Amelie von Wulffen, Veit Laurent Kurz, and certainly to some extent Jonathan Meese. The paintings of that period drew on things more or less commonplace in Germany at the time—children’s books, Johannes Mario Simmel’s novels, mushroom picking, pointed gables, the smoking jackets and functional color schemes of German clothing that Walter Benjamin described. But in the international context, they appeared distinctly grotesque, revealing the secret self-image widely suspected to lurk behind Germany’s attempts to rebrand itself as a cosmopolitan global player. Not to mention how dangerous that all was. This artistic tendency established in the aftermath of Gerhard Richter’s triumphant restoration of painting has probably been Germany’s most influential contribution to the development of art internationally, though it’s still hardly recognized as anything specific in Germany itself. (1)
And now we have Till Megerle living in Vienna, where he works from the landscape in a sense, though he perceives it from a spatial or cultural distance, much like the way you can reconstruct a period in your life through the sensory memories that bubble up from the gestures, hairstyles, and arrangements of people in photographs. In his drawings, they can be assigned to two generations, linking the old with the young though skipping the one in between. This is peculiar, and also irresolvably mysterious, leaving viewers alone in their search for some connecting narrative. Where is this happening? Under what circumstances? And just whose memories are they? Two inert generations can be seen, both in a state of being excessively overwhelmed, hence their timid gestures and postures, left alone with a message or staring right back at the viewer, while the agency and authority of the adult generation is excluded from view. Instead, there is an indeterminate, meandering connection between the old and the young, via long winding arms.
There’s something threatening in that image of connection, even in the care between these two groups. Indeed, it seems to me that there’s always something threatening, hyper-intense, and clandestine in every image of connection in Till Megerle’s drawings. And also an image of the unadvised, who was offered little advice on his quest through the world of memory images, and is incapable of giving any either. By contrast, the sketchy notations of angels are like moments of self-assurance or invocations, like the way one used to make the sign of the cross when one saw something awful.
The general imagery Megerle uses in his pictures is not the everyday kitsch of West Germany nor pictorial world of lived dialectical materialism, but a parallel world of youth culture that arose in the children’s rooms of German housing blocks, or more importantly in between them. It goes without saying that music plays an important part. And in Till Megerle’s work, it’s the pathos of a mute music that plays out across the faces of the people depicted. His music project is called Guiding Light.
(1) There are however similarly autofictional approaches to art elsewhere. The work of American artist Mike Kelley, for example, has occupied Till Megerle for some time and offers a chronicle of the spaces and specific grotesqueries of the US heartland where he was born.
