Motif development Wolfgang Mattheuer's work includes paintings, works on paper, prints and, since 1970, sculptures and objects. The majority of his pictures are so-called recreational pictures and include still lifes, portraits and landscapes. The so-called problem images gained greater importance: In them, Mattheuer takes up mythological, biblical, contemporary and metaphorical motifs, combines them, expands their context and uses these images to create astute, sometimes cynical comments on current events. Well-known examples of this are his pictures of the fratricide of
Cain and Abel, the
Icarus figures, those fleeing and falling, one of his best-known pictures is
Hinter den sieben Bergen (Behind the Seven Mountains). Mattheuer repeatedly addresses man's split between good and evil, between “greatness and misery” (
Blaise Pascal). In the 1980s, Mattheuer was to develop what, in retrospect, was the most significant parable for his entire work, his own mythological figure – the
Step of the Century. In fact, this tearing apart figure is already present in its basic dialectical idea in Mattheuer's earliest pictures. In the painting
Aggression (1981), this ominous figure appears for the first time in the painting's work: the body appears squat and deformed, the head is tucked in behind the torn chest and can hardly be seen. It consists only of the extremities - one arm, stretched out in the
Nazi salute, finds its counterweight in the red-marked leg stuck in the soldier's boot, the other, left arm is clenched into a communist fist, the right leg stomps forward, naked and sweeping. The following are pictures with the titles Nightmare (
Alptraum, 1982) and Lost Middle (
Verlorene Mitte, 1982). Mattheuer writes about this figure: In the garden of his
Reichenbach house, Mattheuer works on the sculptural realization of the figure, which was planned from the beginning. In 1984, the tall plaster model was completed - casts in iron and bronze followed and finally a tall example, which is now in the
Museum Barberini.
Reception In 1985 the painted plaster version was publicly exhibited for the first time at the
11. Leipziger Bezirkskunstausstellung (11th
Bezirk Leipzig Art Exhibition). The State Gallery Moritzburg in
Halle and the collector Peter Ludwig each commissioned a bronze casting. The audience reacted with astonishment and a lot of sympathy to the work shown. The response was even greater a few years later when a bronze cast of the Step of the Century was shown at the Xth and last
Kunstausstellung der DDR (art exhibition of the GDR) in
Dresden. The figure was chosen as the most important work of art in the exhibition, especially because a political discourse was still conducted as an alternative through visual art and literature. Mattheuer said about his sculpture: "This nightmare figure, as the embodiment of absurdity, is 'that conflict between the longing mind and the disappointing world', it is '... homesickness for unity, this fragmented universe, and the contradiction that connects both' (
Albert Camus) and which all too often erupts into aggression and destructiveness, as a centrifugal force that tears the individual apart. No attempt at self-discovery is successful anymore." Eduard Beaucamp, long-time feature writer for
Die Zeit and advocate of the
Leipzig School artists in particular, writes: "This paradoxical metaphor of the century, an aggressive, fleeing end-time figure who has lost his body and his 'center' is a mocking, bitter
swan song for modern dictatorships.” The message of the Step of the Century was also recognized in the then
West Germany. In 1988, the exhibition ''Zeitvergleich '88 - 13 Painters from the GDR''' brought together a whole series of paintings and sculptural works by well-known GDR artists, including Mattheuer's Step of the Century. A journalist judges: “The symbol of the exhibition, […] is a single bronze sculpture. Richly placed on the threshold between the two rooms, Wolfgang Mattheuer's Step of the Century from 1984 creates the leap from east to west." == Locations ==