{"id":29605,"date":"2021-02-10T06:45:35","date_gmt":"2021-02-10T14:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=29605"},"modified":"2021-02-10T06:45:38","modified_gmt":"2021-02-10T14:45:38","slug":"to-know-what-you-want","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=29605","title":{"rendered":"To know what you want"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So why would I write about an artist whose work I don’t particularly like and whose politics I found a mixed bag at best, and pretty upsetting in some aspects? An artist who died about 2 week ago, forcing me to keep my snark at a minimum?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I tell you why. Arik Brauer<\/a> (1929-2021) had a trait that I singularly admire: he did what he wanted in his pursuit of art as well as in life, in full defiance of the demands, criticisms or attacks by his contemporaries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An Austrian Jew, he survived the Holocaust, in contrast to many of his family. He eventually settled in Vienna again after detours of living in Paris and Israel, where he met his wife. He was a singer, an architect, a painter, who engaged in the good fight for environmental protection and the odious fight against muslim immigration into Austria. His views of Islam as an evil force, however shaped by his experience as a Jew, even let him devote paintings late in life depicting what he understood to be the oppression of Muslim women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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During a time where abstractionism was believed to be the future of painting, he engaged in Fantastic Realism<\/a><\/em>, drawing from myth and fairy tales, religious themes and the healing power of nature. As I said, not my cup of tea, but an unperturbed pursuit of what he saw as his best tool for expression. A mix of realism, surrealism and art nouveau, saturated colors and not a scintilla of fear to cross over the border of kitsch, it seems. Below is a short clip that shows a retrospective, no need to understand the German.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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