C.A.C : Can you tell us something about your artistic journey? What led you to devote yourself entirely to painting? R.W : I come from a working-class background. My father was a plumber, my mother a nurse. My parents moved to West Berlin with my brother and me in the early 1970s. They had a strong class consciousness, which is why art and culture beyond pop culture were rather decried as bourgeois and not very present at home. My childhood was very difficult; my father was a heavy alcoholic and died young from drug abuse. I was 14 years old at the time. I often felt the need to escape, and painting and drawing were my means of choice. I also gained a certain amount of recognition for my craftsmanship and imagination at an early age. However, my family did not provide me with much cultural or social capital, so for a long time I was unaware that it could also be my career path. Until then, I had been thinking more in terms of applied arts: graphic design or architecture. The idea of fine art only developed towards the end of my school days, when I showed my work to an emeritus professor, a friend the mother of a friend, and he pointed out that it could also be an option for me. Being quite naive and lacking any cultural sophistication at the time, I naturally had no idea what kind of taste was necessary for discourse at art school, so I had to apply six times before I was admitted to study art. I filled the waiting period by studying philosophy (which I didn’t really understand at the time) and political science. So I was already in my mid-twenties and very skilled technically when I finally began studying art. At art school, I discovered oil painting, which I immediately fell in love with, even though painting was extremely out of fashion in the nineties. I tried out a lot of things, working my way through the only German representatives of painting who were also recognized within the art academy, which was infected with conceptual art: Gerhard Richter and Martin Kippenberger. I learned about art history and discourse, about my strengths and weaknesses, and also how to position myself in the context of my fellow students and contemporary art. By the end of my studies, I was already painting reduced but very realistic pictures of singular objects, which I was later able to use to convince gallerists. But that took a whole ten years, during which I kept myself and eventually my family afloat with various jobs and occasional sales, more badly than well. For twenty years, since Berlin gallerist Michael Haas discovered my work at an off-fair in the then-booming Berlin, I have been living exclusively from art. Today, I work with several international galleries, but I still don’t feel quite where I see myself and my paintings. The pressure to be economically successful is sometimes motivating and sometimes annoying. But it may also be because I’m not willing to pay any price for my career. I care for my health and resist the supposed constraints of the cultural industry a little by putting only a relatively small number of handmade “products” on the market. The time I take for myself is my luxury. For me, living a good life means being able to paint. As long as I can do that and my family doesn’t have to starve, I feel very privileged. C.A.C : How do you experience the influence of Berlin, where you live and work, on your artistic practice? R.W : I moved to West Berlin, which was then divided by the Berlin Wall, with my parents when I was three years old. This city was and is charged with history. Political awareness is deeply rooted here, and political education in school was very intensive and vivid because of this situation. I stayed here, on the one hand, because the Wall fell shortly after I graduated from high school, and it would have been stupid to leave the city at such an exciting time. On the other hand, it was also cheaper here than anywhere else—and for the reasons mentioned above, I hardly had the financial means for alternatives, especially not abroad. There was no money in Berlin in the nineties, but there was plenty of space to experiment. When I was studying art, Berlin was an El Dorado for all kinds of art forms. Everything mixed together because no one knew where they were headed, and almost every spontaneous art event in some catacomb or gray backyard also had a party vibe. In these gothic spaces, art was inevitably installation-based and had the underground techno or hip-hop soundtrack of its time. The connection to music, the existential, and even the debates about postmodernism at that time and in that place had a profound impact on me, even though I continued to paint in a somewhat academic style and had to clearly define and fight for my niche in this environment. Staying here was more of a blessing for me: suddenly there were hardly any Berliners around me, but many new perspectives from all over the world were added, so I didn’t have to jet around the world all the time to acquire them, which I couldn’t have afforded anyway. The discourses in this city continue to this day and are very diverse. L’Art pour l’Art and the art market, although the latter has certainly gained in importance due to the sharp rise in general costs, are only areas of a broad intellectual discourse in a wide-ranging cultural system. In this city, one thing leads to another, and the insistence on the freedom of art is traditionally interpreted here as a political gesture. I still enjoy the fact that there are countless artists of all stripes here, and that there are still spaces where we can meet, independent of the vanities of the art