Dear Shaded Viewers,
A few weeks ago I met Martin Wieser when I asked his friend Theo Mercier to come see a Japanese film at the Jeu de Paume called Sex & Fury. Martin came too. We had a great time at the film, it was totally surrealistic.
DP: Who are your intriguing subjects? Do they come from your imagination or reality? Explain it either way?
MW: I like to observe weird, unusual characters I encounter on the streets or the shopping mall. I like to think little stories about these people. At the end I assemble these ideas about the person in my mind. So it is not so much the person I depict, but rather the idea, an imaginative figure, a character which is charged with personal meaning.
DP: Tell me a bit about your background? Where did you grow up, where are you living now and where did you live in between?
MW: I grew up in alpine Italy, it's a very distant place for me, in the center of the Alps, very rural and raw. This continuously influences my aesthetics very much. I spent a lot of my youth in Ireland, also a very remote island for me. Currently I just returned from Vienna to live and work in Berlin.
DP: I take it your studies were/are in art?
MW: I study at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Wei
