Lot 88 D

As early as 1996, when he was working on the portrait sculpture of Willy Brandt, Rainer Fetting engaged in an intensive process with the multi-layered political and personal circumstances of this commission.
The same immersion in a given theme and its reinterpretation is also required in Fetting’s painterly exploration of “Las Meninas“, the famous painting by Diego Velázquez in the Prado, which followed this commissioned work. “It is […] an attempt to formulate the present from the past by making present positions so blatant that the future can emerge. The past isn’t the discarded and the dead, but the dynamite from which innovation and utopia can emerge – not just an aesthetic experience. […] Here also Fetting creates metamorphoses, transformations, he takes up something that has been designed by someone else in order to be able to create an image anew, as both agent and driving force in the more subjective, more individual visual language of the artist from Berlin.” (Dieter Ronte, Rainer Fetting: Willy Brandt – Die Skulptur, exhib.cat. Galerie Tammen & Busch, Berlin 1996, unpag.). In this series of works, the artist alienates the figures of the template painting by interpreting the sweeping hoop skirts and the backgrounds as diffuse areas of colour and partly inscribing his own person or Berlin city motifs into the portraits. On offer here is a monumental portrait of the Infanta Margarita whose gown is overlaid with white transparent stripes; intense red tones are dominant.