The Age of Neptune – Leben und Werk des Jan Usinger
168 pages
Edition of 400
Cover design: Edi Winarni
28 x 21 cm
Düsseldorf 2016
Published by StrzeleckiBooks
ISBN: 978-3-942680-93-6
With texts by:
Prof. Dr. Anne-Marie Bonnet
Dr. Wilfried Dörstel
Prof. Dr. Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck
Julia Krings
Dr. Dr. Grischka Petri
Michael Stockhausen
The end of the story is its beginning: a photographic series shows how, in 2012, an attic find brought to light the life and work of Jan Usinger (1916–1984) in collages, cut-up magazines, a medical report, private postcards, letters and photographs. The coffin-like suitcase, stored in the archive of the Institute of Art History, yielded the fragments of the life of an almost forgotten artist and trained mathematician who fought in the Second World War, moved to West Germany in 1959 and lost his wife in a tragic swimming accident in 1963. Withdrawn from the world and eventually declared unfit for work, he devoted himself in well over 5,000 collages to his great and presumably psychopathological passion: the comparative juxtaposition of vases and swimsuits.
The artist Matthias Wollgast (b. 1981, lives and works in Düsseldorf) takes up these fragments with a kindred sensibility and arranges the material in a cinematic, chronologically unfolding structure – a “documentarist” practice (Wilfried Dörstel). However dry and matter-of-fact the juxtaposition of photographs or collages with brief explanatory notes may be, between the lines the reader comes across tongue-in-cheek references, humorous combinations and an at times absurd over-staging of documentary black and white.
The monograph, which also includes a catalogue raisonné of the collages and a reprint of the 1978 catalogue for what was until then the only Usinger exhibition, moves between Louis de Marsalle, Hannelore Reuen, “Günther K.”, works by Hans-Peter Feldmann and the current fictions of authenticity in the daily press. The collagist, who died largely unnoticed, receives art-historical consecration thanks to the authors from the Institute of Art History in Bonn, who take up and reflect on Matthias Wollgast’s “Life and Work of Jan Usinger” in their texts.
