Mariele Neudecker Winterreise

Temple Bar Gallery and Studios commences its 2005 programme with 'Winterreise' by Mariele Neudecker, a filmic response to Franz Schubert's twenty-four part song cycle. Neudecker's 'Winterreise' is a series of short-films, one for each of the twenty-four German lieder, made in four locations based on the sixtieth degree of latitude, in places that experience snow-scaped winters; the Shetland Islands, Helsinki, Oslo and St. Petersburg.

The resulting work is a beautiful and moving sequence of imagery, combining winterish leaden colours and frozen skies, encapsulating in a contemporary language the atmosphere of the German Romantic tradition.

Born and raised in Germany Neudecker is now based in Bristol. She is perhaps best known for her atmospheric representations of sublime landscape vistas created within glass vitrines filled with water and treated with salt solutions and dyes. Consistently interested in the German Romantic tradition, the landscapes she depicts in sculpture, film and photography are often recreations of the Romantic landscape by such iconic artists as Caspar David Friedrich.

In 2003 Opera North and Leeds City Art Gallery jointly commissioned Mariele Neudecker to create a visual counterpoint to Schubert's great song cycle. The ensuing work, 'Winterreise', is a visual reflection of Wilhelm Müller's tale of unrequited love, despair and suicide, of a rejected lover who travels from the door of the woman he loves into a frozen landscape. Schubert's music exquisitely expresses the pathos of Müller's poems and is poignantly sung by Andrew Foster Williams in the accompanying soundtrack, the related lines floating over visuals.

In a catalogue essay for Mariele Neudecker's exhibition Over and Over, Again and Again at Tate St. Ives ( 21 May - 26 September 2004) , David Blayney Brown, Senior Curator of the Tate Collection, writes of 'Winterreise' that "the melancholy, restlessness and loss of the lovelorn narrator's soul is evoked not by any sad beauty in the settings, but by their very banality, which creates a sense of non-arrival , of ongoing movement - on a descending escalator or those big, passing ferries".

Mariele Neudecker "Winterreise" (A Winter's Journey)

artists:
Mariele Neudecker

curators:
Noel Kelly