Questioning himself, probing into his own unconscious, self-critical, sincere and perceptive but also acknowledging his own desires, needs, and inner abyss—like in his diary entries, the Vorarlberg painter and drawing artist Rudolf Wacker (1893–1939) affords us touching insights in his work. Compacted with vigorous charcoal strokes, the 1924
Self-Portrait with an Image of a Nude reveals intimate obsessions of a complex artist personality in a psychologically intriguing manner: the subject of sexuality is found in many of Wacker’s paintings, enciphered and clad in a metaphor-rich artistic language. As if the erotically charged depiction of a woman with ample breasts and stretched-out arms behind his disheveled head were actually growing out of his imagination—so the artist looks at us, against a backdrop of forceful hatching crisscrossing in every direction, with asymmetrically raised prominent eyebrows, a crooked mouth, questioning eyes, tense shoulders, at a loss.
MH, 2021