About the work

The drawing is part of a new series of ink drawings/ watercolours bringing together my painting practice and my drawing practice. The grasshopper is an animal that has been showing up in a lot of paintings, animations and drawings over the years. It stands for a number of qualities and associations. It’s role similar to the fly in Ilya Kabakov’s work. For him the fly shows up because of the physical and metaphysical garbage that you could find everywhere in Soviet society. 

Grasshoppers are special insects to me. They represent a state of tension, similar to the tension a global citizen finds himself being faced with: to be somewhere and all of a sudden being catapulted into another uncertain place. For me the grasshopper represents some of the states and conditions we find ourselves in, living in a neo-liberal, capitalist society. In a permanent state of physical and psychological tension, because we can easily loose job and livelihood and have to move where the work is. Or we are in a state where we want to jump, but can’t. A shivering grasshopper. Rarely can we stay in the place of birth, family and upbringing. We are somewhere and then all of a sudden being catapulted somewhere else, half steering half being carried by the wind. It’s a great ability to be able to jump far and to many places, but it’s also hard and demands new ways of finding identity. The grasshopper talks about all this.

Date and country of birth

1970, DE

About the artist

Born 1970 Düsseldorf, Markus Vater lives and works in London. Graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Meisterschüler Alfonso Hüppi (1998), and MA Painting Royal College of Art (2000).

“We call a philosopher someone who neither swears by the old dogmas nor the new catchwords. Someone who dares say “no” where the compact majority has said “yes”; he is called a philosopher here.  A jester on his own initiative.” This is how Fritz Mauthner has the French philosopher Descartes define his role at a happy get-together of philosophers. As he was not also a prophet, he would hardly have thought of Markus Vater. In the present time he would most probably do so, even though Vater states his profession primarily as an artist. The art exhibited by Vater often includes a mixture of courtesy and rebellion. Pictorial and textual notations of things seen, felt or dreamt are condensed diary-like into their own cosmos. Dark desperation emerges which aligns the imagined or moral impossibility but also includes childish and sentimental elements. The flow of Vater’s consciousness is neither impeded by dreamy inanities, nor by a caustic extrapolation of contemporary inhumanity.

– Johannes Stahl

His work is held in public and private collections including Graphic Collection of the Museum Kunstpalast Duesseldorf, Collection of the Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen, Collection Willi Michel of the Franz Gertsch Museum Switzerland, and Falkenberg Collection Hamburg.

Selected solo exhibitions include What You See is not What You Look at, Kunstverein Ludwigsburg (2018); Sitting in a hole that has the shape of a frightened cat, Union Gallery, London (2017); I imagine how You imagine I imagine You, Galerie Rupert Pfab, Duesseldorf (2015); Wogegen ist eigentlich die Gegenwart?, Kunstverein Rostock (2015); Die Unendlichkeit ist auch nicht mehr was sie mal war, Galerie Peter Zimmermann, Mannheim (2013); Lucky Weekend, Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2013); and Open house, Studio Voltaire, London (2012). Selected group exhibitions include Zwischen Nähe und Distanz: Konstruktion von Wirklichkeiten. Von Goya bis Picasso, Kunstpalast Museum, Düsseldorf (2019); Unstilled Life: Artistic Animation 1980-2020, Ron Mandos Gallery, Amsterdam (2020); Brexit: Mail Art from a Small Island, Sipgate shows, Düsseldorf (2019); Kanu islands, Mornewegstrasse 30, Darmstadt (2018); Nebukadnezar, Forum Kunst Rottweil (2017); ASP3 Artselfpublishing Fair, ICA, London (2017); and Particular Conditions, Kingsgate Project Space, SUBStore, Tokyo and Tadahon-ya, Kyoto (2017).

Awards and residencies include DAAD Scholarship to London (1998); and Villa Romana Residency, Florence (2003).