With CURATOR’S CHOICE IV, FS.ART continues its exhibition series in which the selection of works follows the curator’s personal perspective. Having established itself over recent years as a venue bringing international contemporary art to the Lake Constance region, FS.ART now deliberately turns its attention towards artistic positions from the surrounding area. This is not intended as a departure from the programme pursued to date, but rather as an expansion of it: the exhibition demonstrates that artistic quality, formal individuality and contemporary relevance are by no means confined to the major cultural centres.
The three artistic positions are united by a concentrated engagement with colour, material, surface and space. All three operate within the expanded field of non-representational, concrete art, without restricting themselves to its historical formulas. Instead, each develops an individual strategy for questioning painting, opening it up and extending it beyond its classical boundaries.
Eva Hocke (born 1966 in Kassel) lives and works in Bad Saulgau.
Her practice can be situated within the context of concrete art, a field historically shaped predominantly by male artists. Her works confront this tradition with a position that is both precise and distinctly independent. Hocke stretches coloured nylon tights over shaped supports, some monochrome, others coloured, thereby combining painterly questions of colour, surface and form with a material originating from an entirely different sphere — one associated with the female body and everyday life. The result is neither ironic nor explicitly feminist commentary, but rather an autonomous and surprisingly contemporary form of painting. With remarkable virtuosity, Hocke combines colour, material and form into works that move between image, object and space. Alongside her characteristic tights works, the exhibition also presents new pictorial objects in which the artist consistently dissolves the classical rectangular format and rethinks painting in spatial terms.
Birte Horn (born 1972 in Düsseldorf) lives and works in Blaubeuren.
Birte Horn can likewise be situated within the broader context of concrete, non-representational art. Alongside her series of small-format papercuts, the exhibition presents object-like works in which she translates painting into the third dimension in various ways. The papercuts are created from packaging materials collected over many years by her father, himself an architect. Through cutting, layering and serial reorganisation, the artist transforms these materials into precisely composed pictorial spaces of remarkable lightness and spatial depth. She also partially cuts into her canvases before reassembling them into new compositions. In addition, she develops shaped canvases and formed pictorial bodies that consciously depart from the traditional rectangular support. Painting no longer appears here as something confined to a flat surface, but rather as a spatial intervention situated between image, relief and object. Newly created and shown for the first time in Tettnang is a large-scale work consisting of cropped, freely overlapping coloured silkscreens suspended in space. It is precisely through this combination of painterly precision, material experimentation and spatial openness that Birte Horn develops an independent and at the same time strikingly contemporary position within non-representational art.
Gerhard Langenfeld (born 1955 in Saulgau) lives and works in Bad Saulgau.
The artist is particularly known for his black paintings. It is precisely within this self-imposed restriction to black that he repeatedly succeeds in exploring new painterly possibilities. In his work, however, black does not appear as closure or negation, but rather as an open field in which surface, light, structure and depth become visible. And black, of course, is never simply black: there are countless nuances within this colour — or rather, non-colour. Characteristic of his painting is its spatial layering and gradual application of paint, through which the works emerge step by step in the process of painting itself. Layers of colour, overlays and differently reacting surfaces create pictorial spaces that continuously shift depending on the light conditions and the viewer’s perspective. In the exhibition at FS.ART, the artist presents works from the Schwarzproben series alongside new paintings in which he expands his exploration of black through the introduction of intense colours. The result is a compelling dialogue between reduction and openness, concentration and painterly expansion.
FS.ART - CURATOR'S CHOICE IV
