Maskentanz 1 belongs to the series inspired by the Weimar culture: a woman* with a cubistic mask dancing on a nomadic carpet.

It is a tribute to the feminine need for theatricality that often turns ceremonial. This is a ceremonial/magical dance of invocation. The mask is from an older painting of mine (some 45 years ago) that actually depicted an eternal stability and stagnation in the form of an eternal sleep.

Therefore what we have here is Stagnation / Eternity itself, dancing. This combination blurs the line berween flowing time and eternal time or actually attributes both to the same source: the human consciousness.

The human consciousness handles both types of time according to current circumstances.It is important that the dance is performed with bare feet on a warm carpet that stands for “home” or “hearth”, it radiates the warmth and safety that all people long for.

It is also noticeable that the carpet serves as a means to define the space since there is no other indication of space whatsoever. Consequently, this is a dance that connects time with “home”/space, it is the energy of an intelligent consciousness funneled into Space/Time continuum and actually it is an invocation to life itself.  

I must note here that this painting (and likewise the other “Maskentanz” below) is a typical example of my combining “Sublime” and “Picturesque”: the eerie mask and the paganistic dance represent the Sublime (always as described by Edmund Burke)  while the carpet is the Picturesque part.

* the dancer is Mary Wigmann