Rainer Fetting

Rainer Fetting achieved international recognition with the “New Wild Ones” in the early 1980s. With its elements of Expressionist painting, his art formed in opposition to the conventions of Abstract and Conceptual Art toward the end of the 1970s is highly topical again today. Fetting’s painting is a significant precursor for the “queer” discourses on gender, identity, the individual, and power that not only shape the works of younger generations in our globalized art world but also current mainstream debates. His “expressive” portraits, cityscapes, and landscapes as well as the still lifes and flower paintings on which this publication focuses capture psychosocial energies that are evident in every painterly decision he makes. Works from four decades are presented here, some of them unpublished, early drawn studies and paintings from the time Fetting was commuting between New York and Berlin the 1980s and 1990s in addition to recent paintings, works on paper, and sculptures. The illustrated book is published in conjunction with the exhibition in the spaces of the Miettinen Collection in Berlin.