To grow with art and to take the viewer along with him in the process of seeing pervades the oeuvre and work of painter and sculptor David Uessem.

His large size paintings are exceptionally unique. The artist has developed his distinctive Uessem style – an unmistakable mix of hyper-realistic depiction and surreal pictorial composition. Again and again we experience the captivating and irritating combination of human portraits and their partly masking. Natural skin meets another, artificial material. A shiny foil that wraps around half the face with drapes, or shimmering gold, sparkling jewels or bouquets of flowers, in the form of a crown or pop culture motifs such as Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse. David Uessem uses these elements like recurring requisites that apply to his paintings and sculptures. The approach to the genre of sculpture once again illustrates David Uessem's curiosity, dedication and also the conscious exploration of medial and material boundaries.

What we see doesn't usually look at us with David Uessem, but we do experience his point of view. He basically offers the viewer a school of seeing and perceiving. He shows us how he technically dissects the gold in the representation in order to have represented the perfect material with a step back. The folds of the shiny foil become almost imperceptible brushstrokes, which are only visible when approaching very closely. Every work, every material impresses with its perfection and completion.

And at the same time, what is behind remains closed, masked – what we see is pure surface. As viewers, we experience a pleasurable perceptual game between visibility and concealment, between obviousness and masking - and perhaps a competition between art and reality.

David Uessem stands out with his high standards of technical excellence. With his self-developed oil and acrylic glaze techniques, he can create exact color properties and thus shape his image genesis precisely. With the partially colored primed canvases and a pencil underdrawing, Uessem stands not least in the tradition of the old and new masters of art history.

David Uessem learned his precision and the eye for the perfect motif during his first studies of illustration at the IBKK in Bochum. Almost bored with retouching advertising images, he soon turned to painting techniques with passion and curiosity and began experimenting with free painting, exploring and controlling color as a material. He studied fine art with a focus on painting at the same institution in Bochum, where he later graduated as a master student under Chinese painter Professor Qi Yang.

David Uessem lives and works in his studio, a former church, near Cologne, Germany.


Sarah Niesel
Art historian

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