Marieke Wegener (in her Williamsburg studio) began interviewing many area artists this summer for her documentary about the artist Mark Lombardi who allegedly died of suicide in 2000. Photography by Ben Lozovsky
Mareike Wegener is a 27-year-old German filmmaker with spot-on taste for the obscure, the quirky, the hard to pin down—particularly when it comes to visual artists. What’s more, she’s got a sweetly fierce determination to follow her instincts to their fascinating, if open-ended, conclusions. While in school in Cologne, Germany, Wegener managed, over the course of four years, to fund and produce a film on the late Al Hansen (wandering conceptual artist extraordinaire, member of the transgressive art movement Fluxus, and otherwise known as Beck’s grandfather). Now she’s hard at work on an even edgier project, but one much closer to home: a documentary on the late, great artist Mark Lombardi, who died at the young age of 49 (suicide) in his Williamsburg studio in 1999. Local gallery, Pierogi, handles his estate: epic drawings that are, at first glance, little more than diagrams in pencil on paper, but which ultimately claim to chart the scandal-riddled courses and interconnected destinies of political movements, presidents past and seated, political parties, world banks, and, most frightening of all, terrorism. Controversy has followed the work since Lombardi’s death, and the FBI is even rumored to have closely scanned one work in particular in the wake of the events of 9/11. Wegener, meantime, is spending the better part of this and last year sorting out the legacy and history of Lombardi, the man—a task that no filmmaker, until now, has dared to take on for its complexity. It’s a project that’s made her a de-facto W’burg resident.
Late mornings you can find her smoking hand-rolled cigarettes on Bedford Avenue, drinking lots and lots of coffee. Jittery, but better for it, we did the same. What ensued was a conversation that, much like a Lombardi drawing, was full of fragments of interconnected lives, open-ended answers, and some beautiful insights into what makes the creative mind tick.
