If you know anything about the Luxembourgish art scene, you will likely be familiar with Pit Riewer’s oil paintings. After graduating from his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 2022, Pit moved back to Luxembourg and has since established himself as a household name in the country’s cultural landscape. With his characteristically colourful, blurry and nostalgic figurative style, Pit has exhibited his work at numerous well-known Luxembourgish art exhibitions and institutions, notably including Villa Vauban, Luxembourg Art Week and Salon du CAL.
Due to Luxembourg’s extremely high cost of living, it is hard for a lot of young people to become financially independent and afford their own housing. This is also a problem for the country’s cultural practitioners. The income of an artist, even an “official” one, is often not enough to cover the high cost of living. While Pit belongs to a more privileged category of creatives in the country, through having a support network and family home in Luxembourg, and although Luxembourg’s wealthy position provides an increased cultural budget, he points out that in the context of personal independence and the country’s overall cultural offer, it would be extremely hard to pay rent and live in Luxembourg as a full-time artist. “Financial stability [in Luxembourg] is simply not easily compatible with artistic creation”, he says.
He also points to the country’s lack of artistic/professional studio spaces, which has made it hard for him to foster community, but also competition. Since a lot of artists are forced to leave the country due to its lack of artistic spaces and opportunities, the artists that stay behind often lack the necessary stimulation that comes from both healthy competition and thriving community spaces. In just over 2 years, Pit has achieved many of the major milestones that the Luxembourgish art scene has to offer, which is why he has decided to move to Berlin to seek new horizons of inspiration and opportunity.
When speaking of leaving the country, Pit does not only see it as his own deliberate choice, but as something that he has to do for himself in order to further his artistic career: “Sometimes I feel like Luxembourg does not want me or queer people in general here. If it did, there would be more spaces where I feel comfortable”.
Speaking of a lack of comfortable and safe spaces, Pit also mentions the scarcity of queer spaces in Luxembourg, despite the country’s reputation as a queer safe haven. With queerness being a key part of Pit’s identity, he sees it not only as inherent to his worldview, but also as omnipresent in his artistic practice. “Queerness* is always present on the edges of my paintings”, he states, “even if the subjects of my paintings are not overtly queer”.
His longing for spaces in which he feels more welcome and seen is an element that has been reflected in Pit’s most recent work. By taking blurry pictures on his phone on nights out and using them as references for his work, Pit crafts beautiful, atmospheric paintings with a speedy, melancholic and cinematic feel to them. There is a dynamic to his paintings that he thinks is missing in the country, and that he hopes to manifest through his art.
According to Pit, there is a huge lack of queer representation as well as a problem with very performative queer representation in art on a global scale, which is something that he intends to explore within the Luxembourgish context in a potential future project. By conducting research into the queer scene of Luxembourg’s past, he hopes to find reference points for a new series of artworks that would unveil a part of Luxembourgish history that is quasi-unknown to most people in the country. “Queer people have always existed and always will. The way they see and experience the world deserves to be represented in works of art,” he says.
It is through conversations of unwavering honesty and critical reflection that we allow ourselves to open up our current reality to imagine a better one. Pit has given us a glimpse of what it means to be an artist in Luxembourg, how creativity can be a gateway to imagine brighter worlds and what changes this country can start to make in order to accomodate artists and to generate a more welcoming, nourishing environment for them to thrive in.
* Queerness in this day and age has become a key tool in questioning the norms society has put onto us. Queer theory is a practice exercised by many of the community where they question and deconstruct a world that has imposed an oppressive status quo on us. By “queering” our perspective, we allow for a new reality to be imagined beyond the current societal constraints.
Comments