Galerie Dantendorfer
PETER BALDINGER
DANSE MACABRE
19 January – 16 February 2023
Exhibition: DANSE MACABRE
Artist: Peter Baldinger
Period: 19 January – 16 February 2023
Dissolution forms the central concern in Baldinger’s oeuvre, whether through square grids or through the obscuring of the motif by a kind of blurring. This theme once again moves to the foreground in Baldinger’s most recent works addressing Holbein’s Bilder des Todes.
To this day, art history has no clear definition of the motif of the Dance of Death; the earliest known depictions date back to the 14th century. What unites them all is their message: “At the latest in death, all people are equal.”
In 1526, Hans Holbein the Younger created 41 woodcut designs on the theme of the Dance of Death, which were published in 1538 as the book Totentanz von Hans Holbein. As an innovation compared to medieval dances of death, Holbein divided the procession-like sequence of the dying into independent individual images, in each of which Death encounters a representative of a specific social class. Holbein’s cycle begins with Creation, proceeds to the Fall of Man and the Expulsion from Paradise, moves on to the fates of individual professions and social estates, and ultimately ends with the Last Judgment.
What is distinctive about Holbein’s Dance of Death is the enumeration of individual fates according to social rank. Thus, the first to be taken by Death is the Pope, and the cycle ends with the death of a child. The entire work can be understood as a critique of morals and social hierarchy: for example, Death brings an end to the corruption of the Emperor as the highest earthly judge, or to the Cardinal’s worldly striving for material goods. The central message here as well is that, contrary to all efforts of the living, there is ultimately a dissolution of all differences in social rank.
Holbein’s original designs are only about 5 cm in size; by contrast, the motifs in Baldinger’s Danse Macabre are enlarged to an almost gigantic scale and nearly completely dissolved through their overlay with a very coarse grid. In this series, Baldinger attempts to strip the inevitable of its terror by anticipating the process within the works themselves.
Text: Selin Stütz
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