Lambert Maria Wintersberger
Crossing Thumbs

The painter Lambert Maria Wintersberger participated in an exhibition at Galerie Block for the first time in 1967, together with KH Hödicke, Bernd Koberling, and Markus Lüpertz. Wintersberger in particular had already made a name for himself in Berlin at that time with his “cosmetic images.” His paintings show excerpts of disproportionate body parts, often fingers and thumbs, whose injuries, constrictions, and tensions initially seem to disappear in the subtle depiction in delicate pastel tones and aesthetically smooth and objective perfection. In his own unique way, Wintersberger combines elements of hard-edge painting and the visual worlds of Pop Art, thus responding to the contemporary worlds of consumerism and advertising, especially cosmetics, in which he recognizes the real and metaphorical conditioning of human beings and makes it visible in his painting.

For his contribution to the rolling cabinet En Bloc (EB20), Lambert Maria Wintersberger translates the motif of the thumb into a drawing made of shoelaces. Sich überschneidende Daumen (Overlapping thumbs) occupy a separate drawer of the cabinet, which Wintersberger lines with light brown cardboard, onto which he affixes the outlines of two overlapping thumbs with black cut shoelaces using glue.
Text: Birgit Eusterschulte and Katrin Seemann