Matthias Weischer (born in 1973) is regarded as a member of the New Leipzig School, a group of German artists whose figurative paintings caused an international stir a few years ago. Weischer, a painter, usually works on canvas, often in large formats, but for his edition for “Texte zur Kunst”, a lithograph with the simple title “Berg” (“Mountain”), he chose a smaller medium – a sheet of paper. And “Berg” illustrates just such a shift of scale. As Weischer puts it, the geological formation in the foreground sits in the flat landscape “like a pebble.” In fact, the almost figurative feature operates on two scales simultaneously: As a counterpart to the massif rising in the background, it is unambiguously a “mountain”; as a self-contained rounded shape in the company of shrubs and trees that surround it and seem to perch on it (as though they had climbed it), it looks more like an erratic rock – large and small at once, it is part of the natural setting and yet already almost a figure in it. Weischer found the motif as he was traveling in the Alps and captured the “fleeting encounter” – again, his words – in a drawing. The lithograph records this volatile quality as well. A color gradient, from lime green to lilac to the ground’s pale orange rose, forms the backdrop for the scattered wavy white lines of the clouds and the almost inky black brushstrokes indicating fairly sparse vegetation. Although the motif is alpine, the mountain and its surroundings lack all monumentality and instead convey almost a sense of lightness.