Map Paintings 2015 – 2018: Uwe Walther

I grew up in East Germany during the DDR/German Democratic Republic and studied painting in Leipzig under Bernhard Heisig, later on in Basel under Werner von Mutzenbecher. In 1990 I moved to Basel where I still live today. I come from a family of geographers (my Father was a land surveyor, and my Mother a cartographer) and so when I first saw the legendary maps of Switzerland I knew that I would do something with them. Years passed doing various painting projects, but always the idea of painting on maps stayed in my mind. Finally, in the spring of 2010 I had my first exhibition of work entirely painted on maps at the Marc de Puechredon Gallery. Seeing them all collected together was something for which I had been searching for a very long time.

The idea at the heart of my map paintings is quite simple: every map contains different information about the territory that it represents (the location of streets, forests, water, villages, as well as the altitude of the ground etc…). When you study a map, this is the information that helps you visualise the landscape. This is exactly what I do with my pictures: I read a map then I put it into the cinema of my mind and I imagine how the terrain might appear. In doing so, I transfer the objective, technical and scientific elements of a territory, approved and published by the state, into a subjective idea of a landscape.

When one has accepted the idea of a purely imagined landscape, further readings and ways of developing a picture arise. A map can hardly claim to include all the information available; weather maps mostly reveal no more than borders between countries and roadmaps rarely allow you to anticipate altitude, vegetation or likely weather conditions. Swiss maps are revered by cartographers because they have developed a unique way of suggesting the feeling of a place whilst also providing multiple levels of sophisticated technical information. To this already impressive amount of data my paintings add further layers of representation: perspective, weather, the sense of space and people.

My paintings tend towards the classical legacy of landscape painting (inevitably slightly romanticised), but without taking away from nature of the map. I want to keep the image readable, the tempera of the painting and the printed filigree of the map’s surface must work together and balance their separate perspectives: one, a bird’s eye view that is read close to, the other, a landscape, viewed from a distance.

Uwe Walther, 2018