Scan Paintings Michael Wegerer’s approach to painting leads one to the phenomenon of light. The so-called Scan Paintings were created from digitally image-scans. In this case the artist makes scans of all sorts of light and enlarges and prints them on transparent paper, lending them the quality of paintings which is how Wegerer refers to the works. To create the original, painting-like Impression also yielded by spontaneous effects and imperfections Wegerer first applies a gold background to the paper. Found In Byzantine art and later in the Middle Ages, this element is of great importance and highly symbolic. The gold background lends Wegerer’s pictures a particularly warm glow and creates as does the glaze technique taken from the old masters – a spatial depth. In his works Michael Wegerer uses the gold priming also found in medieval book, icon and panel illustration to raise religious content to a more general spiritual level. In the Scan Paintings the artist combines traditional and contemporary effects. He transforms image spaces permeated with mute colors and wave-like forms into contemplative energy fields, shifting the digitally parsed prismatic nature of light back to a kind of transcendent order.

(Catalogue excerpt by Hartwig Knack, art historian and curator, 2014)