Work Series:
Berliner Spätsommer, 2019

The three large-format works from the series Berliner Spätsommer [Berlin Late Summer] are the first works since the resumption of painting after a twenty-year break in 2013 that can be understood as genuine painting and largely renounce on a conceptual approach: Only the question of the relationship between foreground and background in (abstract) painting marked the process of creation as a starting point. In the three paintings, there is a constant change between the two levels. While a colour—reduced almost to a pure function—at one point frames a painterly structure or form behind it, in an interplay at another point it becomes the structure or form itself, framed by the contrasting colour.

Previous painting series always moved within a framework provided by the artist in advance, which set technical as well as content-related and formal restrictions and specifications. In series such as Vor und hinter dem Glas [In front of and behind the Glass], which in the first works vary the motif of the window and the framing in the painting that goes back to young works and, by limiting the motif, reflect the line of vision within the painting. Reproduktion von Frühwerken [Reproduction of Early Works], which, as a work of remembrance, attempts to artistically reconstruct lost or destroyed early works, the painterly completion does not serve as an end in itself but as a medium in order to be able to realize—although with a sensual-aesthetic result—a mental and intellectual-conceptual process. In Berliner Spätsommer [Berlin late summer], on the other hand, the working process does not begin in advance with the designing of a concept or sketches of a composition, but only on the canvas itself. Accordingly, the painterly gesture and the quality of the application of paint are emphasised in particular, for example by exposing individual painterly elements through the surrounding unpainted canvas, such as the diagonal hatching running from white to orange in the centre of the picture in Berliner Spätsommer #2 (2019). In Berliner Spätsommer #1 (2019), the various overlapping layers of paint are revealed in the form of breakthroughs and omissions, and the physical properties of the colours are shown by allowing the paint to run down the canvas. Accordingly, the titles of the works do not refer to a content, but merely indicate the place and period of origin as well as, through the consecutive numbering, the affiliation of the paintings created in parallel.