Martin Disler (1 March 1949, Seewen – 27 August 1996, Geneva) was a Swiss painter, droughtman and writer. He is associated with the Neue Wilde painting style.
Born to a family of gardeners, he was expelled from school in 1968 for disciplinary reasons. He was married to fellow artists Agnes Barmettler and later Irene Grundel. In the 1970s and 1980s, Disler worked extensively in Europe and in the USA, gaining international attention alongside artists such as Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente and Georg Baselitz. In 1982, he exhibited works at the Documenta 7. His awards include the Bremer Kunstpreis (1985), the Preis für junge Schweizer Kunst der Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft (1987) and the Kunstpreis des Kantons Solothurn (1988).Wikipedia
" In the early 1980s painting experienced a brief, yet intense renaissance. Young artists joined together—in Berlin, in the Rhineland, in Hamburg and Austria—to paint in protest against the formal asceticism of Minimal and Conceptual Art, rebelling against the positions taken by Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter. “To us, good old Uncle Richter in Düsseldorf seemed to be further away than the moon,” said Jiří Georg Dokoupil, one of the Neue Wilde in Cologne, summing up the artistic awakening. Their paintings arose from their individual experiences: “Having the courage to simply bring one’s personal experience to one’s art was incredibly taboo at the time,” revealed Helmut Middendorf. This new subjectivity resulted in a wide diversity of styles, but an emphatically powerful brushstroke, a mostly strong color palette, and a frequently cavalier relationship to art historical sources were common characteristics of the Neue Wilde. In short: they had an inexhaustible, fierce desire to create figurative paintings.
In Germany the Neue Wilde came together in loosely organized groups. One of the large centers was Berlin, mainly represented by Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, and Bernd Zimmer, who founded the Selbsthilfegalerie (Self-help gallery) on Moritzplatz in 1977. Formally speaking, the “Mortiz Boys” shared a spontaneous, expressive visual vocabulary, so that they were quickly labeled Neo-expressionists. Thematically speaking, they were inspired by the spirit of the city, revolving around the Berlin underground, the punk scene, and New Wave culture. Furthermore, special significance was attached to personal obsessions and sexual leanings—as in Salomé’s work—or to the classic landscape motif, as in the paintings of Bernd Zimmer.
“My paintings are about me.” This statement—made by Peter Bömmels, one of the members of the Cologne group—could be considered a good caption for the paintings produced by the artists in the Rhineland. Bömmels and his “colleagues”—Hans Peter Adamski, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever, and Gerhard Naschberger—all rented a studio together at 110 Mülheimer Freiheit, the street that gave the group its name. Their works were not as unified in style and content, in comparison to the work by the Berlin Wilde. In remarkably individualistic styles, each artist integrated himself and his radical experience of his own reality into his art.
The term Neue Wilde (roughly, “new savages”) first employed by the art historian and museum director Wolfgang Becker, can be traced back to the exhibition of the same name at the Neue Galerie – Sammlung Ludwig in Aachen in 1980, which drew attention to similarities between early twentieth-century French Fauvism and neo-expressive contemporary painting: Les nouveaux Fauves – Die neuen Wilden. Unlike the term Heftige Malerei (heavy painting),which was also initially applied to the new movement—the term Neue Wilde did not refer so much to the savagery of their art as it did to the savagery of the artists themselves. It was received critically, especially by the artists themselves, who pointed out their entirely subjective visual vocabulary and lack of an overarching agenda, while at the same time rejecting the comparison between their art and an art movement from the past. Yet, despite all of the skepticism, the term stuck."(April 30, 2015 Stefanie Gommel hatjecantz.de )
