Westphalen in his studio, Stockholm, 2012
Olav Westphalen is a German artist educated in America and currently living in Sweden whose work has been exhibited around the world. His most recent solo shows include A Junkie in the Forest: Doing things the Hard Way at Galerie Georges-Phillipe and Nathalie Vallois in Paris, France; and Flip-Flop Factory at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, China. Previous shows include 1 D-Mark at the Polytechnic University as part of The Drachma Project in Athens, Greece; Prow: The Prequel with Peter Rostovsky at the Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York, N.Y., U.S.A; and Desert Dreams, a performance at Studion, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.
He earned a MA from the Fachhochschule fur Gestaltung in Hamburg, Germany, and an MFA from the University of California at San Diego, in San Diego, U.S.A. He currently teaches at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
Westphalen’s work is often funny and irreverent – much like the man himself. We met in his Stockholm studio and laughed over coffee and cardamom buns.
You were born in Hamburg, Germany in the 60’s. Not so long ago, but an entirely different world.
It’s funny, because to me it always felt normal to be born under those circumstances. Now you realize, “Man! It’s a long time ago.” Both my parents were academics but it was totally understood that my mother would stop working when we came. It was actually only because my father got sick at the time that she basically went back into professional life – which was very, very good for her.
My parents were economists. My father was from a pretty rich family, my mother was from a normal, educated middle class family— high school principals and priests and so on, the protestant mélange. But they both lost everything in the war. So it felt like there was this very pragmatic, thrifty, practical, do-it-yourself attitude because you had to somehow build it all up again, but at the same time this wistful longing…
But it was really normal. Middle of the middle class, suburban. The one exception was that when I was quite young— in the mid to late 60s— we lived in Latin America for two years. My parents were doing development work and so we trekked around and lived in five or six different countries over two or three years.
Do you remember that time?
Yes, what you remember as a four or five year-old. I remember the nanny, the garden, the apricot tree, how the neighbor’s daughter got bitten by a snake in Chile and they had to draw lines on her foot to see the infection moving up…
But it was more that it pulled us out of the whole German context. Coming back was a bit of a cultural shock for everybody, maybe most for my parents. They’d had a pretty entrepreneurial student life and they got these jobs that let them out into the world, and somehow coming out of it they thought it had to be this way: that you have to come home, settle, buy the house, raise the family, have reliable jobs… In the case of my father, he became a bank director and I think he just hated it his entire life. But that was just what you did. Those markers were very much still intact. You marry and then you have children and when you have children you move out to the suburbs so you can have a big house…all these things were just unquestioned.
They had been in a student acting troupe, my father was a violinist…all those things just kind of fell off. So I think in a way I had a very sheltered and comfortable childhood but it was also kind of heavy because you felt like, “No one’s really having fun here.”
Olav Westphalen, Amateurs, 2006, Styrofoam, resin, paint
In light of all the expectations and conventions we are talking about, I imagine your parents may not have been too enthusiastic about the fact that you wanted to become an artist.
It’s funny, because both my parents and their parents and families on both sides, were real bildungsbürger – they loved art, they would go to the shows, they would even collect a little bit. But in a way their appreciation for art went along with a complete lack of respect for people who were making art. Art was something to understand, to enjoy, to discuss, to own, to go look at on weekends, but it wasn’t something you made. It was almost like going to a restaurant vs. being the kitchen staff. There was really this very, very solid bourgeois self-satisfaction with the side of the industry they were on.
Of course their reaction when I started getting interested in art was always, “Oh but do something practical.”
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