From the series Hier ist das Wetter schön!
2013-2017

Indian ink on several hundreds mailed postcards from all over the world.

For the works in his most recent series, “Here the weather is beautiful,” Roland Stratmann collected postcards that had been sent from all over the world – mostly from the Cold War era – and combined them into multi-layered images. The starting point are handwritten, stamped and stamped cards, which he arranges into large-format image carriers, and which thus become an essential part of his subtle images of society: storage of personal memories as well as those belonging to the collective memory.

The stamps alone transport zeitgeist and history. One discovers the likenesses of various heads of state, such as Josip Broz Tito from the former Yugoslavia or Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkey. There are also subjects from the areas of sport, nature and technology. He transforms image motifs that the artist researches in the media into large-format ink paintings. These represent the second layer of his complex works. Original quotes from the postcard texts are placed on top. Some quotes lead into the absurd or wistful cliché and hold the mirror up to us.

In the series “Here is the weather nice”, Stratmann explores, with an eye for the grotesque, the entrenched ideas and prejudices that tourism brings to light. The basis for the ink drawings are snapshots that visitors have photographed on their travels and posted on the Internet. Stratmann combines the motifs, which appear strange due to the isolation and graphic implementation, with quotations from the postcard texts. It reflects a bygone era when Europe was still crossed by closed borders and traveling to other countries was considered an adventure. From today’s point of view, the composition of the various image and text levels has a surprising and frighteningly up-to-date connection to the political situation in Europe. Because the renewed demarcation of borders and the ideological isolation of nations that is currently being discussed could jeopardize the individual freedom that has been achieved  and call into question the advantages and the exchange of a free democratic union.

With his postcard works, the artist literally puts his finger in the wound and makes it clear how innocently we often look at our environment and how carefree we deal with ready-made standard formulas, which are supposed to reflect our very own experience. Stratmann confronts the messages filtered out of the pool of collective messages with the pictorial motifs taken out of their original context. The trivial meets the unexpected, the trivial meets the shocking, the past meets the present. The collective judgments and moods extracted from the postcard messages “home” interact with the drawings. This creates symbols of intercultural misjudgment.