Albrecht/Wilke: Fucking Delicious Landscapes

Leitmotifs of a stereotypical German middle-class cuisine hover in front of majestic landscape and nature depictions that irritate and delight at the same time. In their painterly collages, the artist duo Albrecht/Wilke deal with their upbringing in a humorous way. With irony and acumen, they bring bourgeoisie culture to our attention, hitting us with subtle familiarity, even though one wishes, time and again, that it did not.

In the exhibition, the painter duo Albrecht/Wilke, who live and work in Berlin, take up typical German dishes that are particularly polarising. A Hawaiian-toast, for example, knows no shades of grey. Either you love the composition of lightly browned, crisply toasted bread on which a juicy cooked ham and a fruity sweet, canned pineapple are covered by the delicately melting slice of cheese, or you hate it. No matter which side you count yourself to, its promising silhouette stands out from afar and just by looking at it, the taste tickles your tongue.  

The other motifs, whether grilled chicken, Black Forest cake or curry sausage, are also so familiar that their images trigger ambivalent feelings in us. Recognising them and immerse in our own memories is very satisfying because the pictures are so connectable and close. Seeing becomes a pleasure in the truest sense of the word. Like curry sauce to a sausage, the familiarity of the motif clings to us, even though we are trying to keep our distance. Because let’s be honest: there is hardly anything good in a curry sausage, apart from its exquisite taste. Eating meat, as the boss of a large sausage company said some time ago, is the cigarette of tomorrow. And although we know better, the prospect of a quick sausage makes us weak more often than we would like to admit. 

Seemingly without reference, the various delightful treats float in front of landscapes that are in no way inferior to edible pleasures in their familiarity. These romantically exaggerated depictions of nature always find a way into our souls and warm our hearts. It is difficult for us to escape the sublime. Casper David Friedrich already made use of this exaggeration and continues to inspire viewers to this day. Albrecht/Wilke use the same means to present us with a sunset by the sea or a mountain landscape that brings tears to our eyes. 

True to their motto of making only “good painting”, the artists make use of different styles from art history. They sample and combine the fine painterly craft of Romanticism with the coarse brushstrokes of the Junge Wilde and let them clash abruptly. Where Casper David Friedrich used humans to draw the viewer into the picture, Albrecht/Wilke use classics of German culinary. The contrast of the banal Hawaiian-toast meeting an exaggerated sunset characterises their works. The simultaneity of the everyday next to the overwhelming, of the simple next to the content-heavy reference liberates from interpretive constraints and is simply Fucking Delicious! 

Text by Arne Schmidt