#ROSA: JETZT GEHT’S UM DIE WURST | BJÖRN HEYN
While you go shopping in a Bavarian butcher’s shop, your eyes are overwhelmed by an impressive and varied selection of sausages, frankfurters and other sausages. Looking up, however, you notice something unusual, or rather out of place: Jetz geht’s um die Wurst (2019) is the work by the artist Björn Heyn. A large painting, almost two meters high, confuses our perception, is it an advertisement? It is the iconic representation of a particular type of food, popular, cheap and common. In fact, the canvas reproduces a wurst of exaggerated dimensions as if it wants to stylize a series of more or less declared desires that flow into this representation in a natural and amusing way.
Heyn uses painting dedicating himself to a hyperrealism that goes beyond the representation of reality, which tries to get out of the dimension of the painting itself in order to be able to dialogue with the place that surrounds it. In Jetz geht’s um die Wurst, the space in which the work is to live is fundamental: the painting seems to extend from the canvas and play on the real object and the object represented. The butcher’s tiles, the characteristic pink light and the slicers are the perfect place to enjoy the work of the German artist. The illusionistic game that he constructs, between irony and sociological analysis, wants to make us smile but at the same time guides us to a reflection on how we observe without really looking, perceiving only the use and functionality of objects and places of our daily life.
“This is not a sausage” with a paraphrase between the surrealist and pop, so as to be able to ironize not only on the present but also on our visual culture: the work is taken out of the museum or gallery and is brutally inserted into a context unusual to its nature, but perhaps not to its represented subject. If Heyn takes up Magritte’s surreal thought, he does so in an almost irreverent way: the reference is meat, fat and hunger. The artist is not afraid to show the most instinctive desires of man and the vices that animate his interest and insert them in his own research. Jetzt geht’s um die Wurst, which colloquially would mean “now that it has a value”, shows an art that comes out of its predefined patterns and that is proposed as an everyday art. With a playful and ironic attitude, Björn Heyn dissolves the distinct levels between gaze and representation, reality and fiction, flesh and hunger.
Björn Heyn
Jetzt geht’s um die Wurst
acrylic on canvas, 70 × 195 cm, 2019
© Photo Credits: Hanes Sturzenegger
Website: bjoernheyn.de
11/06/2022