Autodidact and maverick: the paintings by Uwe Lausen tell of a time of collective silence in which democracy may have been preached, but in fact in which social constraints, prohibitions, and taboos prevailed.
A middle-aged man sits relaxed, his arms crossed, in a comfortable armchair. His body is somewhat slouched, his eyes are half open, and a smile is beginning to show on his lips. Carpeting with wide, alternating black and white stripes has been painted under the father figure in Op Art fashion. In the background above a ledge there is a row of oversized heads. Young men with chin-length hair and bangs singing into a microphone. The heads are ill defined and in part deformed. At the front the father, and in the background The Who in duplicate?
The black-and-white painting stems from Uwe Lausen, who was born in Stuttgart in 1941 as the son of the later Social Democratic member of parliament Willy Lausen. The artist had lessons in classical violin at an early age, and he grew up in a liberal, antifascist environment. He interrupted his study of philosophy in Tübingen in 1960 and went to Munich, where he enrolled in the law department of the university there, only to ultimately pursue a career as an artist. Unlike the abstraction celebrated by his father's generation, the self-taught artist indulged in figurative painting. He first became a member of the Munich-based artists' group SPUR, for whose magazine he wrote the article "Brief eines Zurückgebliebenen" (Letter from a Backward Man). Lausen was sentenced to three weeks of detention for circulating lewd writing and blasphemy. Uwe rejected his father's help in the form of a lawyer and an evaluation by the head of the art academy in Stuttgart. Sooner go to prison!
In 1961, one year before the Schwabing riots, which would usher in the end of the Adenauer era, Lausen joined the Situationist International, which dreamed of a cultural revolution. When, in 1965, he organized a happening, he was expelled, because the leftist group found this (new kind of) art form much too reactionary. This was followed by a phase in which Lausen, in terms of style close to Pop Art, grappled with what he felt to be the oppressive society in the economic wonderland of Germany.
The father figure appears in many of Lausen's paintings, including "Raumfleisch" (Room Meat) from 1967: a surrealist, psychedelic living-room landscape with an empty chair, a disintegrating suit, a pair of red horn-rimmed glasses, three picture frames, two water clouds, and a blue pipe. In the foreground a ghost with hat and tie, the attributes of philistinism. He almost consistently dispenses with modeling and transitions, and places sharp light and dark edges one alongside the other, a technique that HP Zimmer called "polarization" and the "basis of Pop Art." While Lausen paints in a Pop-Art style, he rejects the affirmative, positive character of the Anglo-American version of the genre. He presents a claustrophobic middle-class living room from there is no escape. The artist paints the motif in all of its variations. Yet despite the floral wallpaper and wingback chairs, it is always a comfortless and violent setting.
In 1967, the year Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a police officer in front of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, Lausen has a street warden shoot psychedelically enlarging blue paint over the head of a general. The general weeps, oblivious to the world around him. Lausen depicts him as if he is caught between a red-and-blue-checkered tablecloth and a potato. The figure of authority has himself become a victim of patriarchy; middle-class life is a burden.
Lausen is torn between snug middle-class life and a revolutionary act of liberation. In 1962 he marries the photographer Uta Stolz, two years his senior, with whom he has two daughters. They move to a farm south of Munich. However, neither his family nor the idyllic landscape seem to keep him grounded. The Lausens return to the city in 1968. Uwe increasingly uses drugs, stops painting, and devotes himself to improvisational music. After several separations, Uta permanently leaves her husband in 1969. Uwe has no permanent residence, becomes unstable, takes LSD and ketamine, and on September 14, 1970, at just twenty-nine, he commits suicide in his parent's home. He had announced it: "he who wants finality should kill himself."