Jeannette Fischer – författare

Wolfgang Beltracchi is a phenomenon of the international art world. His name is inextricably entwined with one of the greatest upheavals in the global art market. Emulating numerous world-famous artists, he developed and painted new paintings, continued their narrations and biography, and concluded them with a forged signature. His wife Helene Beltracchi then smuggled them onto the art market. Many experts were deceived by Beltracchi’s stupendous skill and auctioneers cast many doubts aside in the interests of insatiable market demand, selling the paintings as authentic works by the purported artists.Reading the artistic handwriting of a painting requires an exceptional willingness and ability to be able to empathise and identify with the artist, until you “can feel what the other feels” (Wolfgang Beltracchi). Through extensive discussions with the painter and his wife, the psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer explored this capability that is so pronounced for Beltracchi. In her new book, she places this in relation to the disappearance of Beltracchi’s own signature. As with her previous highly successful book about the performance artist Marina Abramović, Jeannette Fischer has created an exceptionally insightful portrait of a fascinating artist personality.

In summer 2015, performance artist Marina Abramovic and psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer spent four days together at Abramovic's house in the Hudson Valley. Associating freely, they explored - from a psychoanalytical perspective - Abramovic's biography and art and what connects them. A better understanding of herself, her personality and her work, was Abramovic's objective. She claims that conversations with artists abound, with one curator saying this and another saying that. Yet there is no book in which psychoanalysis puts her life and artistic work in context. This new book aims to fill this gap. Yet it is not a therapist's report, nor a record of Fischer's analysis of Abramovic. It records the dialogue between artist and analyst attempting an interpretation of Abramovic's extraordinary violent performances that sometimes reach the brink of faint, even death. The two search for an understanding of the underlying structures and dynamics. Abramovic performs relationships, and she performs violence, yet she remains on her own in facing the pain and fear about it. The book is arranged in a sequence of dialogues, separated by Fischer's comments on and images of four of Abramovic's performances to which the psychoanalyst refers.