Word: mattheuer
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...icon of escape, Wolfgang Mattheuer's Die Flucht des Sisyphos (The Flight of Sisyphus), from 1972, is unmistakable. A worker is suspended in mid-stride, fleeing the path of the stone he has been pushing uphill; he's both dodging the plummeting boulder and heading for an idyllic valley. But here's the twist: when he painted it, Mattheuer was an avowed communist coddled by East German apparatchiks, yet the work is an obvious protest at the condition of life for ordinary folk in the G.D.R. - not the sort of thing one expects a state-supported artist to have produced...
East German artists have also had to adapt. The regimentation they have experienced has inspired images that speak powerfully to East Germans. In one painting by Leipzig Artist Wolfgang Mattheuer, a modern Icarus with gossamer wings struggles to fly above healthy, ordered garden plots, where most of his neighbors are too busy to notice. A statue by Mattheuer offers a more telling glimpse of the dilemma that East Germans face. A frightened man, his face creased with worry, is shown removing a mask shaped like a sheep's head. But, as the East German artist explains, "he is just...
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