Wentrup is pleased to present the group exhibition ABSTRAKT during Berlin’s Gallery Weekend.
The group exhibition ABSTRAKT is featuring nine artists, whose works offer different approaches to abstraction. The formal qualities of abstract artworks are significant not in themselves but as part of the work’s expressive message. Artists work by reviving and transforming archetypes from the unconscious of modern culture. Therefore, the most useful questions to ask about contemporary abstraction are: What themes and forms does it retrieve from the tradition of modern art and how have they been changed? The exhibition is combining artists that reflect different styles, materialities and visual vocabulary of abstraction.
Since the late 1990s, Markus Amm has been methodically and sensitively exploring how the materials of painting, reduced to their essences, cohere into abstract images. His work can be luminous and illusionistic or bracingly sculptural and physical, and in many cases, it is both of these things simultaneously. Amm is also interested in how the perception of time informs the processes of making art and looking at it, as the processes he uses to produce many of his works require long periods of waiting and looking. The paintings therefore pose questions about how we distinguish between action and reflection.
Gregor Hildebrandt’s work makes formal reference to Minimalism while engaging primarily with concepts of cross-media transfers of music and poetry into visual art. Hildebrandt’s core materials are almost exclusively sound recording media, such as magnetic audio tapes and vinyl records, which he processes, or records he records with specific songs before using them on canvas, in photographic prints, or in expansive installations. For Hildebrandt, sound carrier as an artistic medium, particularly in its original role as a medium for storage, thus fulfilling an important function: it enables the artist to add a further “invisible” dimension to his pictures. Playing with perception in this way is a major characteristic of his work; the picture is completed in the head of the viewer and made visible.
Wyatt Kahn is primarily known for his investigations into the visual and spatial relationship between painting and sculpture. Kahn assembles complex wall-mounted works in which the gaps between the individual canvases give rise to abstract or pictorial compositions. Rather than tracing the lines and shapes directly onto the canvas itself, he turns them into physical components of the artwork. Referencing the tradition of minimalist abstraction, Wyatt Kahn’s monochrome multi-panel ‘paintings’ are informed by a desire to explore non-illusory forms of representation. In essence, their subject becomes the interplay between two and three dimensions, as experienced via shifts in surface, structure and depth. In Kahn’s work, the wall upon which the work is hung becomes an integral part of the composition. Interested in a painting’s potential to function as the very embodiment of the object it depicts, Kahn has also developed works in which the shaped stretchers combine to create the form of an actual object, while a synthesis of hand-drawn motifs and words epitomise its essential qualities.
Gerold Miller’s artistic practice gravitates around questions of imagery, focussing on the relationship between conceivability and visibility. Between geometric unambiguity and visual ambiguity, and the viewer's active involvement. Major influences come from the Hard Edge painting of the American West Coast, the experiments of the Italian Zero movement, and the Neo Geo movement of the 1980s.
Miller's work shows how the path to non-objective art inevitably leads back to reality. They arise from an irreducible use of form and color and dispense with any possible content. The setting of art as place and present plays a significant role in his entire oeuvre. The artist is concerned with the viewer's perspective on himself in a defined surrounding space and how he locates himself in relation to it. The merging of artwork and viewer becomes an ever-changing process, making the simultaneity of place and time an essential factor. The two red tones of TO 17 (2020) allow illusionistic depth spaces to emerge from the surface, which is only revealed in the process of perception. At the same time, they create a tension, leading to a static and dynamic interplay. TO 17 thus acquires not only a strong physical presence but also an extreme immaterial one.
The abstraction of Katy Moran’s paintings exists in a unique place wherein pictorial allusion and material obduracy find peaceful accord. In each work, Moran’s finely tuned techniques conjure scenes that can sometimes be suggestive of landscape, still life or portraiture while exploring colour, composition and gesture. Her titles, similarly, are at times literal, random, and autobiographical, almost moving freely with the gestures in each painting. Certain works have titles relating to their source inspiration, while others are named with spare, intimate, and often playful musings which relate to the imagery that come to light in the work, such as cloud face (2019). Recently described as an “abstract painter of figurative mood,” Moran enlists a wide scope of mark-making to conjure different atmospheres in each painting. In this latest body of work, every chosen surface is readymade including found framed paintings. She works her own brushstrokes over these supports, sometimes leaving fragments of the original layer to show through, at other times obscuring it entirely.
Mary Ramsden creates abstract compositions in which amoebic forms fuse with bold, gestural mark-making. Ramsden’s practice is unapologetically painterly. Her works are testament to a commitment to painting as a progressive language that demands our attentive engagement. Strategically refusing referential readings, she makes painted objects whose compositional unity belies the complexity of their making. In Ramsden’s work even, the subtlest adjustment is generative. Each shift in palette, variation in scale, or nuance of mark effects an incremental development within a broader scheme of experimentation. A recurring theme in Ramsden’s work is a preoccupation with the edge: a concern that is realized formally and pursued methodologically.
David Renggli’s oeuvre, spanning from sculpture and painting to collage, is a witty engagement with the topics of western society as well as a reflexive exploration of art history. In his large-format series of I Love You paintings, paint is applied to the back of glass panels, which leads to a strong luminance. The physical presence of this luminance is stronger than the rational mind. Here, the artist’s concern is to reveal the discrepancy between an intellectual discourse and the claims made of modern art on the one hand, and a physical truth that is determined by beauty on the other. In addition to showing this, Renggli is also interested in honesty and redundancy. This is also how the title of this series is to be understood: while the phrase “I love you” is used in an inflationary manner by a majority of people, and thus loses significance, when it is meant honestly, it is the untouchable very essence of what is beautiful, true, and good. In this way, Renggli applies the principle of reversal by taking the ‘beauty’ of abstract painting to such extremes that it almost threatens to slip into pure superficiality. The inflationary quality of abstract painting that operates with a gestural brush flow and saturated colors is opposed to the serious aspirations and claims of beauty.
Urban music, film, popular sports, youth culture, and the local tradition of storytelling have all influenced the development of Robin Rhode’s initially typical Street Art aesthetic. His trademark is a wall that stands in a socially disadvantaged district of Johannesburg. In contrast to Graffiti and Street Art, however, he is not interested in what he leaves behind in the urban context, but rather in the process. Step by step, he photographically documents the development of narratives on his stone canvas, which in turn carries its own history. The sum of the photographs forms the narrative. While he initially drew simple sports equipment with chalk on the ground or the wall, his designs and themes have become increasingly complex—a content-related balancing act between the history, culture, mentality, signs, and codes of South Africa and the abstract language of European art history. Here, the drawing is activated by its connection with the body: Children do gymnastics on sports equipment, a pianist destroys a piano, an agile dancer cuts colored triangles on the wall with a huge hedge trimmer, as if they were cut-outs à la Matisse.
Based on a visual vocabulary of complex forms and surreal body fragments, Jan-Ole Schiemann’s works oscillate playfully between the limits of abstract painting and anthropomorphic figuration. His pictorial worlds create a dense, sometimes transparent mesh that abandons the contours of clearly defined, special structures in favour of an ambivalent, cleverly interwoven composition. The structures of the pictorial space, created associatively on the basis of stencils and shadowy fields of ink, seem endless. They are delicately woven to form a superimposed net underneath the works, which, in the manner of collages, takes up the multiple references to comics, gestural abstraction, and early animation film in order to link them with references to Arshile Gorky’s post-cubist silhouettes or Carroll Dunham’s strangely fluid pictorial creatures.
