Installation view

June 22 – July 31, 2010

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery presents Shape Language, a group exhibition organized by Natalie Campbell.The works on view rethink the basics of color and form while treading the line between what is inside and outside a formal vocabulary. The starting point for the exhibition is Blinky Palermo’s Graue Scheibe from 1970, in which form attains a precarious autonomy: an irregular lozenge of shaped noncolor, floating (almost) freely on the gallery wall.

Shapemaking is an incessant, purposeful activity; it allows forms to speak and generate their own next iteration or question, as is apparent in Amy Sillman’s humanized, electric canvas and Imi Knoebel’s Messerschnitte collage series. A sense of experimentation carries through the silhouettes and shadows in Amy Granat’s photographs of destroyed, manipulated film. Jason Tomme’s hybrid of painting and monotype uses spray paint and a pressed sheet of paper to make process, physicality, and serendipity visible, while the marks in Zak Prekop’s delicate painting emerge from a process both immediate and contemplative. A hulking, monolithic sculpture by Esther Kläs creates an almost human personality out of surface and volume. Everyday materials generate their own unique idioms: in Patrick Brennan’s paintings, the matter-of-fact layering of paint, popsicle sticks, silk, and other craft media embeds daily life within an anxious yet confident visual field.

The curves and planes of Keiko Narahashi’s half-formed clay pots create surprising, unstable relationships that shift fluidly between two and three dimensions. A similar optical play emerges between the rigid lines and the traces of spray paint in Ned Vena’s painting. Simultaneously physical and disembodied, the shaped and stacked canvases of Joe Bradley and Wendy White make use of the tension between surface and edge, fullness and emptiness. Adam McEwen defamiliarizes shape and opens it to new meanings, appropriating and altering a form from Ellsworth Kelly’s Curve series with representations of banal text messages. Playing off of the contrasts and harmonies among these works, the exhibition coheres around the near-freedom of a visual language grounded in the physical world.

Charlotte Posenenske, Vierkantrohre Serie D, 1967
(Reconstruction 2009)

March 12 – May 30, 2010

The initial exhibition at Daimler Contemporary in 2010 will show major 1960s trends in German abstract art from the Daimler Art Collection: Constructivism, Zero, Minimal Art, Concept and Seriality. Starting with 1950s predecessors – such as Josef Albers, Norbert Kricke and Siegfried Cremer – the show considers abstract art developments in the cities of Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Stuttgart, Berlin and Munich, but also looks at contiguous Swiss positions. About 60 works by 28 artists are being presented, all developing a specifically German Minimalism in the period from 1954 to 1974 in various media (sculpture, painting, film and drawing).

Participating Artists:
Karl Heinz Adler, Josef Albers, Joachim Albrecht, Peter Benkert, Hartmut Böhm, Siegfried Cremer, Hanne Darboven, Karl Gerstner, Imi Giese, Mathias Goeritz, Kuno Gonschior, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Hajo Hangen, Erwin Heerich, Gottfried Honegger, Norbert Kricke, Thomas Lenk, Heinz Mack, Karl Georg Pfahler, Verena Pfisterer, Charlotte Posenenske, Christian Roeckenschuss, Peter Roehr, Ulrich Rückriem, Eckhard Schene, Klaus Staudt, Franz Erhard Walther, Herbert Zangs

In the early sixties in Germany, a new kind of Minimalism developed that was initially largely independent from the developments in America at the time. This German Minimalism was in many cases stimulated by, but also in conflict with, Concrete Art and the European Zero avant-garde, which drew attention to it from 1957 on, starting in Düsseldorf, with unusually staged exhibitions and spectacular projects for public space. The steles, cubes, and picture objects produced by the Zero artists, which lay in the space or stood in front of the wall, represent a significant new step for German art in terms of quality around 1959/60. The Düsseldorf Kunstakademie played an important role in the transition to a specifically German Minimalism from 1962 until around 1970. In the sixties, it provided many of its students with a basis for examining minimalized sculpture. Among them, the young Franz Erhard Walther developed his first proto-Minimalist objects starting in 1962, followed in 1964/65 by Imi Knoebel, Imi Giese, and Blinky Palermo. At the same time, Hanne Darboven in Hamburg, Charlotte Posenenske in Offenbach and, outside academic contexts, Peter Roehr in Frankfurt conceived their first attempts at Minimalist works.

On the occasion of this pioneering exhibition there will be a three-day symposium on May 15 -17, 2010, held at Daimler Contemporary in Berlin. The publicly accessible symposium is inviting protagonists, important collectors, curators and active gallery owners of the time, academics, art critics and journalists, who will give insights in talks, panel discussions and specific lectures. By engaging experts from the respective genres the symposium aims to draw an encompassing picture of the minimalist movement in the field of music, literature, film and dance in Germany.

Daniel Göttin, Transformer 2, 2008

After 2step, minimalpop, Painted Objects, Double Exposure, A Bit O’ White, My Eyes Keep Me In Trouble, Yo, Mo’ Modernism, With Your Eyes Only, COMPOSITE VISIONS is the ninth touring group exhibition organized by CCNOA, Brussels, Belgium.

Since its last theoretical stance as a sublime yet powerful art form, creating a new -ism and ironically also stating the end not only of painting but possibly also of visual art in general, and of its intellectual process, the idea of the ‘reductive’ itself has made an impressive return. Traces of the idea of the ‘reductive’ and similar approaches to art-making can be found in many artistic oeuvres which have come into the limelight since the overpowering postmodern related statements by artists and critics in the late 80’s, and the aesthetics of the ‘reductive’, nonobjective and concrete are now a subject of reflection in contemporary art practices, re-emerging from an imposed quasi non-existence.

In this state of relative non-recognition within the discourse and debate around art and culture in general, the subject of the ‘reductive’ as a possible antithesis to the overpowering reintroduction of representational painting and at the same time to the emergence of the focus on new media, technology and photography, has regained considerable strength over the last decade within an international frame of cultural production and commerce, as well as through the firmly held lone positions of artists like Mosset, Charlton, Armleder, Morellet, Palermo and others throughout the 80’s and 90’s.

Having seemingly recovered from the harsh critical overtones after almost being eliminated from contemporary discourse, in which a retroactive and purely commercial tone took over, the ideas and strategies of the ‘reductive’ and ‘essential’ have slowly found their way back into artistic language and practice. Yet, due to the visual superimpositions of present times, artists have started to shy away from the rigid limitations of -isms related to the ‘non-objective’ or ‘reductive’ and have embedded existing ideas, confluence of styles and approaches into the contemporary world, the here and now, mingling with popular culture as well as branching out of the studio practice inherent in painting as we know it and as the majority still likes to understand it.

Crossovers with other forms of art, like pop art, installation, and new media, play a major role in this new understanding of art-making in the realm of the ‘reductive’ and in its breaking out of its claimed territory with excursions into new planes of understanding, confronting the remarkable stakes which are on offer within the perimeter of ‘reductive’ art production today.

COMPOSITE VISIONS is triggered by the multitude of influences entering the thinking, thought process and practices of an array of like-minded contemporary artists from around the globe working within the fascinating and resilient discourse surrounding the historical, formal and contemporary explorations within the field of the ‘reductive’ in general and ‘reductive’ painting in particular.

Organized by the Brussels-based CCNOA COMPOSITE VISIONS comprises the work of 16 international artists and aims to give a modest inside overview of the possibilities within this broad approach. This type of exhibition is never able to display the entire palette of diversity; CCNOA’s objective is simply to document some of the thinking around this subject.

Participating Artists:
Kjell Bjorgeengen, Julian Dashper, Delphine Deguislage, Edith Dekyndt, Daniel Gottin, Clemens Hollerer, Camila Oliveira-Fairclough, Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi, Michael Skoda, Tilman, Alan Uglow, Jan van der Ploeg, Dan Walsh, Lars Wolter, Carrie Yamaoka, Beat Zoderer

October 3 – November 15, 2009

Following the presentation of 2 Sea Pieces by Gerhard Richter the MMK Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt/Main is reconstructing Wall Drawing # 261 by Sol LeWitt, which was originally shown 1975 in the Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst in Bremerhaven. The artist, who died in 2007, conceived over 1,000 wall drawings, all of which were numbered and as such represent a lifelong series. The wall drawing has a long tradition in the Kabinett in Bremerhaven, which began in1970 with Blinky Palermo’s wall painting based on the Kabinett’s shop front and continues to this very day. For example, in 2008 Luc Tuymans placed himself in firmly in this lineage and reverted back to Palermo by citing the latter’s drawing with one of his own. Tuymans’s work not only extended across the walls but also onto the floor of the Kabinett.

Sol LeWitt’s career began in the mid-1950s, when he worked as a graphic artist in the studio of architect Ieoh Ming Pei. In the 1960s, he published his own ideas on art theory, among other things in the then pioneering magazine Artforum. With the treatises entitled “Paragraphs on conceptual art” (1967) and a year later “Sentences on conceptual art” he defined a quite unique approach to art, setting it off from the predominant Abstract Expressionism of the day, and coined the term ‘conceptual art’ that was to be used by an entire new generation of artists. He summarized the essence of his views in 1967 as follows: “I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.”

Aside from a few paintings, drawings, and sculptures this idea gave birth to LeWitt’s most famous basic idea – the conception of the wall drawings. The artist’s instructions expressed on paper serve as the basis for the wall painting, which represents the visual, artistic manifestation of the idea. Any skilled drawer could then realize the drawing. The artist himself can, realize his own work, but this was no prerequisite.

A short and clear concept underlies Wall Drawing # 261 – a composition of lines on a colored wall. The person executing the art work is meant to draw 45 white lines on a wall grounded in yellow; the lines must be such that nine lines run from the four corners of the room and another nine lines run from a point in the wall’s center. No specifications are made, however, as to the length of the lines or the exact yellow tone, which is actually the favorite color of Jürgen Wesseler, the driving force behind the Kabinett in Bremerhaven. In other words, the person executing the painting is given a certain leeway from the outset. This introduces an element of planned chance, as it were, into Sol LeWitt’s wall drawing. No two drawings will as a result be identical given that the person realizing them does so according to his own experiences and notions. Moreover, once the artist has formulated the respective idea he can no longer influence the actual oeuvre as realized, because that very realization lies in someone else’s hands. The importance of both chance and of time (after all, the wall drawings tend to only exist temporarily) recall the concept of time and composition used by John Cage not to mention the spirit that infuses Nam June Paik’s works.

Firmly rooted in the critical mindset of the 1960s, LeWitt broke radically with numerous art traditions and questioned the relationship between work and author. The artist’s own act of creation is restricted to the conceptualization and is isolated from the execution of the work by painting/drawing. Since, or so Sol LeWitt’s concept would have it, anyone can realize the work of art, this considerably reduces the aura surrounding the artist as a person inspired by a unique idea. With this novel approach, LeWitt ushered in a significant shift towards an objective art less shaped by the intellect or emotions. Today, it is difficult to imagine how radical this artistic strategy must have seemed 40 years ago.

Click to purchase on Amazon

Twenty-one-year-old Peter Heisterkamp began signing his colorful and playful abstract artworks Palermo in 1964, when peers noted his resemblance to the American gangster Frank “Blinky” Palermo. This handsome book—a historical and critical study of Palermo’s painting from the time he entered Joseph Beuys’ now famous class at the Düsseldorf academy in 1964 to his death in 1977—explores his significance for postwar and abstract art.

Christine Mehring notes that over the course of Palermo’s brief career he created five concurrent but distinct bodies of work: objects, cloth-pictures, wall-paintings, metal-pictures, and collaborative projects, primarily with his friend and colleague Gerhard Richter. Mehring shows how each of these groups demonstrates Palermo’s efforts to lead German art out of its international isolation and to transform modernist painting into historically resonant abstraction by incorporating artifice, humor, period colors, and play.

Christine Mehring is associate professor of art history at The University of Chicago.

 

January 10 – February 15, 2009

MOT International founder Chris Hammond interviews artist Thomas Kalthoff.

“One cold April afternoon in Cologne I spent a few hours at the studio of an artist I had recently been introduced to. We drank coffee and ate large slabs of gateau whilst discussing painting, Palermo and the Cologne scene in the 1980’s and 90’s. All the while I was flicking through a large pile of photographs of the artist’s work from the last few years, all of which were quite remarkable. What was more remarkable was that Thomas Kalthoff, despite being friends with Krebber since the late 1970’s and having mixed with many of the German heavyweights from the Cologne period, was little known outside his close circle of friends. Even more remarkable was that he had quite happily kept his work to himself for all these years. This exhibition of new works by Thomas Kalthoff at MOT INTERNATIONAL will be the artist’s first in the UK. Below is an abbreviation of our conversations around his work, but viewing this work is the only way to discover Thomas Kalthoff.

 

Chris Hammond: When did you start to paint the cube\box and what is its’ significance in your work?

 

Thomas Kalthoff: I started to paint monotone grey boxes on small canvases around 1992-3 for the Friesenwall 120 exhibition. At around 1995 I painted lots of organic formless canvases using only three colours. This developed into grids, rectangles and squares. I rediscovered and started painting boxes again in about 2002.

The significance: I remember that I was very early (1979) inspired by packing cases of washing machines and refrigerators. This not necessary as art but its’ imposing presence in the room. I did not immediately follow this up since I was not interested in commenting on design or packaging at all, but its ambiguity. When I re-discovered the boxes in the 90’s I wanted to explore this vacant quality I had earlier discovered.

 

CH: What made you move to rendering the boxes as sculpture? Also how do these works relate to the paintings?

 

TK: I started to make the 3D boxes around 2004. While I had been painting these boxes I had often brought my groceries back from the supermarket in cardboard boxes and they seemed to accumulate in my house. One day it occurred to me to build, out of wood, a 3D version of what I’d been painting. The result fascinated me and I built more to explore this dimension. This in retrospect seems to be a completely natural development. The boxes and paintings are of equal value.

 

CH: Could you tell me a little about the method of display, the use of home made tables and plinths?

 

TK: I felt it was very important that every box needed space all around it, It is not just a question of presenting the boxes more officially. The boxes in the paintings for example have to have the space around it. They need their own space. Similarly the 3D boxes could sit on the floor or on a white plinth, but that didn’t seem to be enough. Each box needed its’ own unique stand or table to be displayed on. I felt this accented the character of the boxes.

 

CH: tell me about colour in the work, do you consider yourself a colourist? Where do the colours come from?

 

TK: I don’t consider myself to be a colourist. I am not interested in the beauty of the colours themselves. My choice of colour is extremely related to a tension between harmony and discord, accord and disharmony in the relations of the colours to each other. This tension is to find a balance in the colours in each image or box where the colours resonate with each other. I use colours to get a result that creates both conflict and resolution.

There is no model that I use to choose and select the colours. I have a palette of fifty colours and I mix them sometimes with each other but mostly I use them straight from the tube or mix them with white.

 

CH: How do you place your work in relation to Palermo or anyone else?

 

TK: I find it very difficult to compare myself to someone who is so well known. I find a great affinity with artists where their work is monochrome and/or the form simple. For example Palermo, Morandi, Tuymans, On Kawara, Zobernig, E. Kelly, De Keyser, West, Gober.

 

Thomas Kalthoff was born in Essen in 1954. He started studying mathematics in Berlin 1975 – 1976 before changing to art school and in 1979 went to art school Karlsruhe for 1 semester, meeting Michael Krebber. Back in Berlin Kalthoff saw, for the first time, a catalogue by Palermo and everything changed. He found it impossible to paint and spent much of the 1980’s traveling or working in various jobs. In 1988/89 He moved to Cologne, where his friends Krebber and Strothjohann introduced him to the scene there and he was able to start painting again. In 1993 he had his first solo exhibition with about 20 grey box- paintings(fuse- boxes ) and 3 Wittgenstein- house paintings. In 1997 he was in a group show at Galerie Daniel Buchholz with small house paintings and in the same year started to make the grid paintings. In 2002 he had a couple of two-person exhibitions at kjubh Kunstverein. (with Strothjohann) and from this time on was painting mainly the box motif. Kalthoff has remained elusive over the years, showing rarely apart from a few group shows such as at Galerie M 29 in Cologne in 2004. Choosing not to self promote and to concentrate solely upon his work makes Kalthoff unique and this is a great opportunity to discover an artist who has, until now, remained hidden.”

 

Michael Graeve, Untitled, 2008
Digital print on aluminium, 28 x 36cm

August 27 — September 20, 2008

…”Sometime during the same period I was to read the following passage written about Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel:

“Palermo is a craftsman, moving on from one commission to the next and assembling individual pieces with the utmost care; by contrast Imi Knoebel pays his objects just so much attention as they need in order to exist – the attention that a farmer devotes to the separate departments of work on his land. Imi Knoebel treats his work like a farm, on which many different activities are kept going with great skill. Dairy cattle, therefore butter and cheese; perhaps some bulls for breeding; young stock; perhaps a few oxen and pigs; grass for pasture and winter feed; cereal crops of various kinds; woodland for winter felling; any number of fruit trees, and therefore fruit juice and liquor; any amount of chickens and geese; a dog and a couple of cats; perhaps a fine horse; pigeons on the roof; a mill on the stream; and a quarry by the roadside“…

 

July 2008

Meeting Imi and Blinky at Dia: Beacon, by Sharon Butler 

Philip Guston Works on Paper, by John Yau

 

June 2008 

David Novros with Phong Bui, by Phong Bui 

Wynn Kramarsky with William Corbett, by William Corbett 

Tribute to Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), by Dorothea Rockburne & Nan Rosenthal 

Mel Bochner, by David Markus 

Milton Resnick: A Question of Seeing, by Thomas Micchelli 

Weltanschauung and Abstract Painting, by Robert C. Morgan 

Rebecca Horn: Cosmic Maps, by Joan Waltemath 

Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, by Josh Morgenthau 

 

May 2008

Abts’ Traction, by Sharon L. Butler 

Helen Miranda Wilson, by John Yau 

 

April 2008

Tadaaki Kuwayama’s Aesthetics of Infinity, by Robert C. Morgan 

Dan Walsh, by Cassandra Neyenesch 

Ruth Root, by Nora Griffin 

 

March 2008

Howard Smith Stroke and Structure, by Joan Waltemath 

John Zinsser Recent Work, by Stephanie Buhmann 

Agnes Martin, by Ben La Rocco 

Thomas Nozkowski Paintings, by John Yau 

Harriet Korman Recent Paintings and Drawings, by John Yau 

Agnes Martin’s Homework, by Jeremy Sigler 

Freeze Frame, by Craig Olson

 

Installation view

May 17, 2008 — ongoing

Dia Art Foundation presents Imi Knoebel’s 24 Colors—for Blinky (1977), at Dia:Beacon. This epic cycle of 21 paintings marks Knoebel’s first sustained engagement with color in its manifold guises. Viewed by him as a gift from his close friend, German painter Blinky Palermo, color would become for Knoebel a primary agent in an ongoing exploration of the metaphysics of picture making. This presentation of 24 Colors—for Blinky will be the first time that the work—acquired for Dia’s collection shortly after it was realized—has been shown in North America. 

Knoebel made 24 Colors—for Blinky shortly after the death of Palermo, whom he called “the master of color.” To create the monumental work, Knoebel constructed 24 individual panels from wood, none of them containing a right angle, and painted each with a single, unmixed hue, ranging from cadmium orange light and quinacridone crimson to phthalo turquoise green and Paynes grey. All but one of the elements of 24 Colors—for Blinky comprises a single-shaped painted wood element; the exception consists of three such panels superimposed on each other. 

In this vibrant suite, Knoebel employed so many different colors that the work connotes the idea of color as a formal entity in and of itself, rather than as a signifying agent. As with key earlier works, the installation of 24 Colors—for Blinky can be variously configured both in terms of sequencing and in the number of elements on view. For the exhibition at Dia:Beacon, 24 Colors—for Blinky has been completely restored by the artist.

Abstract artist and musician Mark Dagley has been working in New York and Europe for over twenty-five years. Drawing from various postwar art movements and developments: Op Art, Washington Color School, Monochrome Painting, as well as European modes of art making, such as Support/Surface and Radical Painting, Mark has created a diffuse, yet particularly American body of work.

Last spring Mark retrieved a group of paintings he had in storage at his parents’ home in Washington, D.C. Although dating from 1986-87, the paintings look to me as if they could have been done yesterday. The paintings do not look like historical pieces, reflective of a specific time, and they would not look out of place in a gallery today. I’ve found in them pop associations to video game, skate board, and surf cultures, though they still preserve a tie to the aforementioned precedents.

 

DV: Let’s go back a bit… Mark, you studied at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C. Did you study with any of the Washington Color people: Leon Berkowitz, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring?

 

MD: I was at the Corcoran during spring and summer of 1975, taking night and weekend classes in color theory and painting, while still attending high school. Raymond Wilkins, my art instructor at Oakton H.S., suggested these classes, since my interest in painting and sculpture went beyond what he was teaching. So they let me in. Maybe he pulled some strings. I don’t know.

 

Ed McGowin, Children, 1969
Vacuum formed plexiglass, 10 modules, each 4 foot radius

I took classes with Ed McGowin, whose early vacuum form plastic pieces still look good, and with Lowell Nesbitt, when he was available. They pretty much let me do what I wanted after the first few weeks. I was painting geometrically, more or less, from the beginning f my studies. Not much has changed with my work since then.

I was very grateful–and relieved–that not only Wilkins but the Corcoran instructors had taken me seriously, even though I was only seventeen. They showed me a lot of valuable techniques and studio practice: from cleaning brushes to stretching large canvasses, to using masking tape and architectural templates and tools. Most importantly, I was taught how to apply acrylic and oils in different consistencies to get the effects I was seeing in the work of the D.C. color painters.

My teachers also pointed me to the essays, books and magazines that any young artist should be familiar with. I was brought up to speed fairly quickly, shown that this was a real profession with a living history.

Leon Berkowitz was chairman of the Corcoran’s painting department at that time. Gene Davis, who was quite a star then–about as big as a D.C. artist could be–was there too. Anne Truitt was still alive. Sam Gilliam and William De Looper were quite well known. Even as a student, it was clear to me that a great moment in painting had just passed in the city. Morris Louis had only died a dozen years previously. Color Field was still very much in the air. It was the official party line, so to speak.

 

Color Field Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Washington D.C., Anne Truitt 17th Summer (left), Paul
Reed #1D (center), Gene Davis Wall Stripes No.3 (right)

P Street was still the center of the D.C. art world then. The Henri Gallery, located there, had a Thomas Downing or a Gene Davis on the walls up until its closing, in the mid-90s. It was run by an old school grand dame who called herself Henri, pronounced with a French accent, though she otherwise sounded–and most likely was–completely American. Things were still 60s cool then, or at least she was. She wore sunglasses and fabulous baubles at all times of the day. I finally introduced myself to her about fifteen years ago and told her about my teenage trips to her gallery. She ended up taking some of my paintings on consignment, but died shortly thereafter. She left her vintage glove collection to my wife, a fellow glamour gal for whom she’d developed a fondness.

 

DV: You also studied at the Boston Museum School. The Museum of Fine Arts regularly held major exhibitions of the Color Field artists. As an art student in Portland, Maine in the early 70s, I would come down to Boston on field trips and see Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Ken Noland, Jules Olitski, or Larry Poons at the MFA, as well as Joan Snyder’s stroke paintings and Katherine Porter’s early zigzags at the galleries.

 

MD: Yes, I did attend school there for a short while. I have to say that it was, in many ways, a grave error. The dialogue with working artists that I had experienced in D.C. was sorely lacking. While Professors Natalie Alpert and Sandi Sloan showed some enthusiasm for the dozen of so geometric paintings and the selection of wooden reliefs that my father had helped me transport in a U-Haul trailer, there was little other interest in Color Field or geometric painting at the Boston Museum School.

 

Mark Dagley
Planks, 1975
Wood, 23 X 38 inches

I couldn’t accept the school’s empty academic formalism. It seemed, in this environment, that painting as I had known it had been played out. Though I appreciated their positive feedback, I found Alpert’s paintings overly fussy and precious, and Sloan’s work at the time wasn’t very compelling to me. I missed the intrigue, the eccentricity, the cut and dry quality that is particular to the best of the D.C. painters.

 

Gene Davis
Red Dog, 1961

It was big news when visiting artists like Alan Sonfist or Nancy Holt would arrive on campus. The students were supposed to assist them with a project, get some hands-on with a “pro.” I was the only one who helped Alan make 8-foot-high compost heaps in the school courtyard out of wet autumn leaves, lunchroom garbage and dog shit. I don’t think he liked the Museum School much after that. Neither did I. Guess I should’ve enrolled in the course they called “Winning!”

Didn’t receive much, if anything, in terms of practical advice. After being told by instructors whose work was provincial at best, artists without any professional experience, that I would have to begin again–”Slow down a little, kid”–I went my own way, moved my art materials out of the student classrooms and started painting in my studio apartment. I never went back to the painting department, or showed anyone my geometric work again…until I moved to New York in 1979.

The winter of ‘76 was so cold that the water in my toilet bowl actually froze. That’s when I started to plan my escape to the Big Apple.

 

DV: You are also very active as a musician. While in Boston, you were in an art rock post punk band, The Girls, which released a single produced by David Thomas on Pere Ubu’s own Hearthan label. Later, after you moved to New York, you formed a blues-based punk avant garde noise band, Hi Sheriffs of Blue, which also had an acclaimed underground reputation.

 

MD: Luckily the Museum School had a small electronic music studio with a few decent synthesizers and some other good gear. I hung out there with the other misfits, stoners and rock & rollers. At least they understood that the place was a total drag. I also discovered the photography and video studios, and the performance department, where all the cute arty girls were hanging out. That’s where I learned about Acconci, Beuys, Nauman, the Velvet Underground, Kraut Rock, Eno.

I started going to the New England Conservatory of Music whenever John Cage gave a talk, also to MIT, which had the best videography department in town. Between 1976 and 1979, I met many of the artists and musicians I would later run into in the East Village: Pat Hearn, Mark Dirt, David Bowes, Nan Goldin, Jack & Dan Walworth, John Miller, Peter Dayton.

We would check out parties and events over at Massachusetts College of Art, which was only a few blocks away. That seemed more like the Corcoran–you know, a real art school. I remember being impressed that you could buy art supplies right on campus. No such luck at the Museum School. And Mass Art had an actual stage, a sound system, lights–the whole works. Many of the instructors were professional artists, like Peter Campus and Don Burgy. We would take our videos over and do performances there. Peter Campus would show his latest work along with the students.

By 1976 punk rock had entered everyone’s radar. I had seen Daved Hild, a classmate in electronic music lab, perform at the Museum School in gessoed clothes and white sunglasses with a woman named Pseudo Carol. Since I played guitar, I asked if I could join them. They said yes, but our band days were quite shortlived. Pseudo Carol moved on, and, after playing out a while as a duo, Daved and I set out to find some artists who wanted to start a Captain Beefheart/Kraut Rock type of group. Robin Amos became both our synthesizer and bass player, which wasn’t terribly convenient. We realized we needed a fourth on bass. Daved mentioned a guy named George, who was bringing his guitar to the T-shirt factory they worked at: a really good classical guitarist, funny as hell. A few weeks later, George Condo was in. We chose the most awful name we could think of that still sounded punk: The Girls.

 

The Girls, circa 1978
From left to right: Mark Dagley, George Condo,
David Hild, Robin Amos
Photo: Margie Politzer

David Thomas heard us perform about a year later and brought us to Cleveland, into the same studio Pere Ubu worked out of. He produced our only single, which he released on his Hearthan label in the spring of 1979. By November of that year, the band had dissolved.

George Condo and I left Boston for New York on an Amtrak train in late December with maybe $400 between us. After getting set up in the East Village, we started another group called Hi Sheriffs of Blue, modeled after the 1950s electric blues bands from Chicago and Detroit. We tried to play not only hard electric blues but punk, fake jazz, funk and rap. We were together for about three years.

 

DV: You continue to make original and uncompromising music today, often combining slide guitar and electronic effects with fractured rhythms. How does your music feed your visual art making and vice versa?

 

MD: I’ve been a musician since childhood. We always had a piano in the house, and music lessons were required from day one. I started playing the guitar when I was around eight years old. I was in garage and surf bands with my brothers in grade school, and then during high school in folk, rock and blues bands.

I try to keep whatever I’m involved with musically a little primitive, very clean and simple, but I don’t know if my art really informs it that much. The things I’m interested in doing with painting just don’t apply to my music. I have no problem with the formalist viewpoint: a separation of the arts may be a good thing.

 

DV: The paintings you are showing at MINUS SPACE were exhibited at Tony Shafrazi’s in 1987. What was going on in the art world at the time you made these? How do you think this body of work related to Neo-Geo or other painting trends going on in New York at the time? Can you tell us about when and where they were made and how you arrived at this particular look?

 

MD: Well, by 1981 or ‘82 it was pretty clear to anyone living in the East Village that we were in the midst of some sort of art boom. Condo’s career took off, and by 1984 he was selling out shows with Pat Hearn, who we both knew from Boston. Soon after, he moved to Europe, where he enjoyed even greater success. Things were happening really fast, at least for him and many, many others.

As for me, it was difficult making contacts, meeting artists who did the sort of work I was interested in. I visited André Emmerich Gallery (which is where I thought I belonged) frequently, always with slides in tow, though I never had the nerve to show them to anyone. Finally, at an East Village exhibition, I saw a red monochrome painting by Olivier Mosset. It was tough and uncompromising, and it was one color. This I understood.

 

Olivier Mosset
Untitled, 1970
Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

I introduced myself to Olivier, who then introduced me to Steven Parrino. I ended up sharing a studio space with Steven for seven years.

Around the same time–1985 or 1986–I met Alan Uglow, Li Trincere, Max Gimblett and Barry X Ball. We did a fine group show at The Mission Gallery in the East Village. Soon after that I was in another group show with Olivier and Bill Beckley at Tony Shafrazi’s gallery. Tony offered me a two-person exhibition with James Nares the same year. As he was doing brisk sales with my work, I guess he felt comfortable enough to offer me the entire gallery. I had my first solo exhibition there in September 1987.

While preparing for that show, I knew I would have to pull out all the stops, treat art like a full-time job. I was at the studio by 9 a.m. every day, building my own shaped canvases, working with enamel paints, fiberglass, stainless steel sheets and whatever scraps I could afford from the surplus shops on Canal Street.

I started to experiment with surfaces, polishes and varnishes. I tried buffing and sanding different types of paint, but had trouble achieving the desired result. I wanted to make something that had a surface like a custom car, a surfboard, or a piece of lacquered furniture. I craved a California fetish finish, like a John McCracken sculpture, but I wanted it on a painting. It also had to be a shaped canvas that was informed by classic geometric painting. Most importantly, it could not look the least bit cynical. This was a tall order.

My carpentry skills at the time were primitive at best, plus I had no real tools or workspace. I realized I needed to up the production level to get the results I envisioned. After a few weeks of material trials, I ended up finding the polymer resin material that restaurant and bar owners use to coat the tops of tables. It worked perfectly, drying to a sleek mirrored surface. I then found a good carpenter who could make the shapes exactly as I wanted, down to the smallest detail.

 

Mark Dagley, Work in process, 1987

I would plot the shapes out on graph paper, then make a small cardboard maquette. A few of the designs were anthropomorphic, but most were non-referential. Color decisions were sequential, sometimes random. I worked on the cardboard maquettes until the finished wooden structures returned from the carpenter.

After finishing three or four of these works, I realized I needed quite a bit more space. I ended up subletting William Burrough’s Bunker on the Bowery from John Giorno during the summer of 1987 and was able to complete the entire exhibition there.

 

Mark Dagley, Studio view, The Bunker, 222 Bowery, August, 1987
Photo: Beth Phillips

DV: Op Art has been getting a lot of renewed interest and visibility lately. Recent museum and gallery exhibitions have thoroughly surveyed the movement, from its quasi-scientific origins in the 60s, through its Post-Structural deconstruction in the 80s, to its current incarnation. You participated in Post-Hypnotic, a 1999 traveling exhibition exploring the resurgence of optical effects in the work of an international group of artists. When did you begin using Op phenomena as a model for making new paintings? How does it  continue to generate new work?

MD: After the Shafrazi exhibition, I took a temporary studio in Cologne, Germany to prepare for an exhibition at the Hans Strelow Gallery in Düsseldorf. I painted stripes and dots on unprimed canvas, something I’d done a decade previously. I also started to make my own stretchers again.

 

Mark Dagley, No Title, 1989
Acrylic on unprimed canvas
Collection: Foundation Prini

I produced the dot paintings by standing on a ladder over the canvas, which was rolled out on the floor, and letting the thinned paint rain down on it: This produced an unintentional moiré effect. Though I found the results quite interesting, I never really pursued their implications, but I guess my involvement with Op Art started there.

After working through a series of eccentric handmade shaped canvases and a group of torqued monochromes (which I exhibited in New York, at Stephanie Theodore Gallery, following a second show with Strelow), I attempted to locate areas of surface and support that had been overlooked in painting. I wasn’t terribly excited by the properties of paint, as were many of the abstract and geometric artists I met in Germany. I had developed more of an affinity with Blinky Palermo, BMPT, the Zero Group and Concrete Art.

 

Mark Dagley, Radical Structures
Kunstverein St.Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
21 August – 26 September 1993

The material qualities of the paint and its application became perfunctory for me. I really wanted that impersonal look, but, paradoxically, I wanted to achieve it painting by hand. Simultaneously–around 1990–I reduced my palette to red, yellow, blue, black and white. This was a little scary at first because, all the sudden, my work began to look like Mondrian knock-offs. But I could see ten or twenty paintings into the future, and I knew they’d never been done before, that this was unexplored territory.

I called these works Primary Sequences, as they were comprised of just that: a 12-inch red square, placed next to a 6-inch yellow square, then, next to that, a 3-inch square of blue, and so on. This led to a whole series of paintings based on sequences and systems. But one thing I felt was missing, or discarded from the foundation of 20th-century geometric art, was classical perspective, so I also started doing one-point perspective line paintings in primary colors. I immediately noticed that they had an optical effect. They reminded me of Raymond Loewy’s Shell logo and the shopping mall supergraphics I grew up with.

 

Raymond Loewy
Redesigned Shell logo, 1967

In 1995, after completing dozens of single-point perspective line paintings, I turned my attention to the dead center of a square canvas. My Corcoran training came in handy here. I began tracing dots in pencil with a circle template, as one long, spiral string. I started with the smallest hole that a pencil point would fit into, figuring I’d trace dots up to 1.5 inches. I don’t think I ever got that far.

It seemed that the drawing more or less made itself. After about a week, I had filled a 74 x 74 inch canvas completely. Then I painted the dots in: red, yellow, blue, red, yellow, blue… I knew from the start that there would have to be three of these paintings: one in primary colors, one in secondary, and one in black, white and gray. I still have to complete the one in secondary colors. Though they’re not difficult paintings to make, they’re extremely time-consuming.

Funny, I never set out to make Op Art. As far as my work is concerned, I much prefer the term systematic painting. The opticality is just the sexy part, the by-product of the real issue at hand, which is structure.

 

DV: Lastly, tell us about Abaton Book Company, which you run with your wife Lauri Bortz.

 

MD: I had my own record label, Tweet, for a brief time during the early 80s, and Lauri ran an independent film company and a small theater troupe in the late 80s, early 90s. We met in 1994, through George Condo, and launched Abaton Book Company in 1997, with a volume of Lauri’s one-act plays.

I’d always wanted to produce limited editions and artist books. Knowing so many interesting artists made it a natural move. We released a boxed set of twenty-five artist booklets called The Five and Dime, in celebration of the new millennium. Titles by Alix Lambert, Judith Fleishman, H.D. Martinez, Steven Parrino and me followed.

We expanded Abaton, adding a record label in 1999, which features singer/songwriters Marianne Nowottny, Julia Vorontsova, and Corbi Wright; jazz chanteuse Devorah Day; Indian classical singer/musician Veena Sahasrabuddhe; punk bands Shell, The Girls and Fuzzy Wuz She.

In 2003, we converted our garage into an art gallery, aptly titled Abaton Garage. We’ll be launching season five with a photo exhibition by Alix Lambert. There’s usually live music at Abaton Garage openings, mostly by artists on our label. And lots of food. Lauri always cooks up a storm.

 

Don Voisine is a Brooklyn-based painter and President of American Abstract Artists.

 

Blinky Palermo, Red, Yellow and Blue, 1975
Acrylic on aluminum, four parts, 26.7 x 147 x 0.3 cm

October 21, 2007 — January 20, 2008

The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen present the first comprehensive exhibition of Blinky Palermo’s work in Düsseldorf, Germany.  Palermo came to Düsseldorf in 1962 in order to study at the Academy initially under Bruno Goller and then under Joseph Beuys. He developed his unmistakeable abstract pictorial language here and later in the USA (1973-1976) that decisively extended the concept of the picture and explored a new relationship between composition and space.

 

Blinky Palermo, Flipper, 1970
Screenprint on paper in 2 parts, 33 x 35 inches each

April 5 — May 4, 2007

Guy Goodwin installation view

June 16-24, 2006

When Guy Goodwin re-stretched his painting C-Swing (1974) at my studio earlier this year it looked so good, that we decided to have a little show of his work. In the office, to keep his paintings company, Ulrike Müller has installed my collection of question mark paintings, and Dean Daderko has selected an illustrious group of lunch guests. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, June 16 2006, from 6–9pm.

–David Reed

In the front studio:
Guy Goodwin: C-Swing (1974), Spine (1978), and Olive Oil (2006)

In the office:
Too Many Tear Drops
with a poem by Gregg Bordowitz
Richard Artschwager, Jessica Diamond, Richard Allen Morris, Ulrike Müller, Carl Ostendarp, Michael Reafsnyder, Scott Reeder, Al Ruppersberg, Rosa Hanna Scott

In the lunch room:
Guess who’s coming to lunch?
curated by Dean Daderko
Robert Barry, Stefan Eins, Rochelle Feinstein, Pam Fraser, Jeff Gauntt, Ron Gorchov, Mary Heilmann, Christine Heindl, Jasmine Justice, Lee Lozano, Klaus Merkel, Richard Allen Morris, Laura Owens, Blinky Palermo, Ruth Root, Al Ruppersberg, Alejandra Seeber, Haley Tompkins, Nicholas Wilder

reedstudio
506 Greenwich Street, Storefront (between Canal & Spring)
New York, NY 10013
212.431.3051

introduction
It seems somehow appropriate to me that Daniel Göttin’s recent wall works — those in which lines of tape placed on a wall are used to make a large, dense web of intersecting lines — are called Networks.  Over a two-month period Daniel and I talked about his art via electronic messages relayed back and forth across a complex network of thousands of miles of cable between Basel, Switzerland and Northern California.  He could write to me in the evening, and I would receive his message moments later in the morning, a kind of time travel.  My job was easier than Daniel’s—we wrote to each other in my native English, rather than his native German, and I got to ask all of the questions, then sit back and wait for his reply.

As we sent questions and answers back and forth, and also exchanged pleasantries and observations, our conversation began by meandering from point to point, gradually establishing different nodes of reference.  Over time an order was recognized, and the conversation was eventually shaped and contained within the boundaries of the interview format.  In doing this we responded to a situation and found a form within it.  Similarly, I recall how in our discussion Daniel described his process when making site-specific works, and it occurs to me that his work is also a conversation, but one that takes place with materials and spaces that involve time, various distant locations, perhaps negotiations with bureaucracies, and a flexible and open language.

Just as how in our interview Daniel speaks with extreme clarity and thoughtfulness, his art also possesses these qualities.  But this clarity is not the result of a fixed or repetitive position or strategy.  Instead, his art is iterative, responding to changing conditions and environments.  Different aspects of his work, both the works made on the wall and the objects made for the wall, are inter-related and work off of and reflect on each other.  There is a wholeness to what Daniel refers to as an entity—his body of work.

—Chris Ashley, February 2006

 

The following conversation between Daniel Göttin and Chris Ashley was conducted via email in English between December 2005 and February 2006.  For further information about Chris Ashley, please visit www.chrisashley.net.

 

Chris Ashley: Daniel, your work can be roughly divided into two groups: site specific work and colored or painted objects for walls.  The site specific works for interior walls are typically made with paint and tape, and you make works for exterior walls, too.  You also make painted objects for the wall out of aluminium or MDF, and sometimes free-standing objects.  Can you talk about the difference between these two kinds of art?

 

Daniel Göttin: The difference between these two kinds of art is a difference of location and condition.  The starting-point for a site specific work is the space with its specific qualities where the work will be installed.  I use the given information (for example, plans, photos, sketches) to create a work that co-exists with the space.  It is a collaboration between the given, already existing part of the site and the new part I add to the site.  The idea is to combine the already existing with the new into an entity in time and space.  The work only exists in and simultaneously with the space, and both become active parts of the art work having equal rights.  It is not possible to move one of them to another place—its existence is unique.  The works made of aluminium, MDF and other materials are works I produce either in the studio or I let them (or parts of them) be produced in a factory.  In many cases it is again collaboration, this time with the factory worker.  This changes the conditions.  I don’t need a site but the studio to make the work, and the number and sizes of the works are limited.  The works made in the studio don’t depend on a specific site, but on the conditions of technical possibilities of production.  They are movable, and they can be shown in different places.  Since I am switching between the two kinds of art mentioned, they are still parts of a broader entity.

 

CA: How would you define this broader entity, which I assume is your overall concern (or concerns) as an artist under which all your work falls?

 

DG: The broader entity is the view of the world in general.  Art is one aspect besides many others.  It is about art and life.  It is not so much about art itself as one entity and life as another entity, seen besides each other.  It is, rather, a permanent mutual influence.  Art can be a way of living, and life can be artistic.  Art is not necessarily only painting (like most people think), or sculpture, or something else in the field of art.  To me it can be anything I see or define as art.  It is a free field without boundaries.  It is about the conciousness of how someone perceives something: the world; the far; the near; the broad; the detail.

Usually art happens in the context of a gallery, a museum, or in places pre-defined for art.  In these places the work shown is defined as art because of the context.  It can also be challenging making art in a place which is not defined for art.  Then art plays on the same level as anything else; it connects with life.

 

CA: Besides showing in Europe you have also shown quite a bit in Japan and Australia.  How have those opportunities come about?

 

DG: These opportunities came about through the universal language of art as I understand it.  Also, as a two-way system communicating between two equal parts, the existing and the new, the known and the unknown, the seen and the not seen.

 

CA: Do you find that working in different locations—different cities and counries—greatly affects the work that you produce there?  Of course, you find various materials in different places, so there is that affect, but I wonder if there are other influences that are specific to the  location in which you’re working, for example, language, light, geography, pace of life, etc.  How do these affect a work that you produce on-site?

 

DG: Installing and producing in different locations certainly has an affect on my work.  Sometimes I consciously include aspects of the local situation into my work, and sometimes I only realize the influence later.  Thinking and working is about connecting and relating to the site where a work is made or installed.  Being aware of the location or the site is part of the concept.

For example, in Australia the light is so incredibly intense that it changes the color range of some of my works.  In Marfa, the presence of Donald Judd’s work and some of his artist friends’ work is so strong, and so sensitively, precisely and carefully installed in the context of the natural environment and everyday life, that it sharpens the perception and the conciousness of how to work with material, proportion and space.  In Japan, the visual and architectural language had some effect on a concept for a tape work I executed there.  The work turned out to be a European-Japanese combination.  My artist residency in New York last year was different again.  On the one hand, there was living and working on the edge of Soho and Chinatown, between East and West, in this fast, big business, art metropolis.  On the other hand, the experience of all the waste, and all the low budget projects, made me work in a more improvised way, with leftover cardboard, for example, and even taking up photography.

Since one location is remote and quiet, and the other is busy, fast and loud, different locations have different effects on my work.  A beautiful landscape, a vast night sky, the incredible ocean, friendly people, interesting discussions, great art, cultural offerings, a good restaurant, a nice bar, a fun time— everything is part of the experience.  All of these specific qualities in different conditions and in each location is a challenge for new work.  I adapt my concepts and myself to the new situation.  My cultural background connects with the background of the new location.  This is what makes a site specific art work possible.

 

CA: In an interview around the time of your Chinati residency you said, “I use normal materials.  They’re not expensive.”  You also said, “I don’t do things that anyone else couldn’t do; but I DO them.”  If these words were taken out of context it might make your work sound somewhat ordinary or simplistic, which it isn’t.  An important distinction between doing and not doing something creative or meaningful is actually “doing” it—taking action  How did you arrive at using the materials you use, and how do you go about making a site specific work?  You have referred to making “interventions“, and I would assume that time—or, perhaps, the time given to make a work— is a factor in how a work comes about.

 

DG: The Chinati residency was a good opportunity to use everyday material, since there was no other (art) material to get at that time in remote Marfa.  I made a site-specific work from material I could find in town, again working with the given conditions.  I got white cardboard boxes (with no printing on them) from the post office down the road, and some clear adhesive tape from a small supermarket called Wynn’s at that time.  Since the Southern Pacific Railroad impressively divided the small town in front of my studio every day, it made sense to me to include rocks from beside the railroad tracks for the work.  All these materials were within a mile’s distance—I just brought them back for a temporary artwork.  Normal, everyday material means material that is only valid in its usual context.  And doing means to materialize an idea, to make it exist in the real world.  An artist residency gives me the chance to spend some time in a foreign place.  It is interesting and challenging to visit a new place and find out what I can do without having a plan.  Everything is new: the people I meet; the location; the way of living and the way of making art.  I use the time I spend in a new place for creating a work that is related to the whole situation and its conditions.  This is the source, a point-zero combined with my previous experience.  The conditions can have a strong influence on the work, as well as on life.  This leads to a way of working that enables me to make art work in any situation.  I would like to make art works of any size, of any material, in any place.  Conditions can be, for example, time, location, space, materials, language, impressions, and money.

 

CA: What are the criteria by which you can determine that a temporary, site-specific work produced under these conditions (newness, foreignness, time limits) is successful?  Can you give an example of a wall work that you thought was particularly successful, and explain why it was successful?

 

DG: One temporary work I made in 1994 in Switzerland was an allover tape work in a big factory, at that time used as a cultural center with guest studios.  It was a beautiful space, but the view had been blocked by many movable walls, and a lot of things were lying around for a long time.  I decided to take out all the walls to empty the space and to clean the floor.  Then I mounted horizontal bands of black adhesive tape onto three outer walls, and also horizontal bands of clear tape around three sides of the freestanding inner coloumns.  The whole space only changed a bit, but it was the first time visitors could see the space itself in a new way, only slightly changed.  

Another work I made was in 1998 at the newly opened Kunsthaus Baselland.  It was the very first exhibition there, and I had the chance to use the whole basement space to make one big installation.  The idea was to introduce the space itself to the visitors.  I made a concept for all the walls and the floor using black adhesive tape in different widths, clear tape, and green artificial carpet.  

A third exhibiton I made in 2001 was at the Haus für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst in Zürich (now called Haus Konstruktiv, in a new place).  This place is the heart of the first, second and contemporary generation of Schweizer Konstruktivismus and Konkrete Kunst—Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Verena Loewensberg, Fritz Glarner, Camille Graeser, Hansjörg Glattfelder, Beat Zoderer, and others.  I decided to paint the walls of four spaces in four different colours, and put an allover network of black adhesive tape entirely across each of the walls.  The first space was painted green, and I placed a Le Corbusier sofa from the office of the museum onto a blue artificial carpet.  A small radio stood in the corner playing a daily program.  The second space was painted yellow and was left empty.  The third space was painted orange with the model of the new museum standing on a blue carpet as well.  The last space was painted pink, and visitors had the possibility to see images of the renovation of the new museum on a computer, which was also standing on a blue carpet.

These three examples are installation works dealing with a real situation, time factors, and artistic and non-artistic conditions.  If I can say each was successful, it was maybe because of the treatment of the whole situation, and an unusual use of usual industrial materials in a subtle way.

 

CA: There are of course precedents for site-specific wall works.  Probably the two most important contemporary figures noted for their wall installations beginning in around 1968 are Blinky Palermo and Sol Lewitt; each is noted for his handling of space and his process for working, and the resulting work cannot easily be called painting, sculpture, architecture, or even decoration.  In 1979 an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago called “Wall Painting” included Robert Ryman, Marcia Hafif, Lucio Pozzi, Richard Jackson, and Robert Yasuda; this exhibition seems apart from your approach since it primarily focused on moving  painting from the canvas to the wall.  Currently, David Tremlett makes large wall drawings using imagery and color inspired by his travels.  Jan van der Ploeg, your contemporary, makes wall paintings that have a conceptual basis and which, I think, seem to flirt with a Pop-influenced, neo-Modernist decoration.  Even earlier are the examples of Schwitters and El Lissitzky’s “Prounen Raum.”  And of course, there is also the long history of frescos and murals.  How do you see your work in this history?  What are some of the concerns that you share with these artists, and what do you see as unique to your work?

 

DG: The concern that I share with many of these artists is the fact that the wall is not only a wall to which the work is applied; it is an active part and support of the work at the same time.  Many wall works stay in line with being a painting on the wall not linked to the site.  The wall remains the background for the painting with its motiv coming from somewhere else.  Architectural-spatial specialties and details are more hidden or covered rather than consciously included.  I see the unique part of my work in the presence of the existing wall including details (doors, switches, plugs, tubes, and other irritations) and the motiv at the same time.  It is what I would call concrete.  The way of reading the work is reading one thing.  The existing wall makes the work visible, the work makes the existing wall visible, and seeing both simultaneously makes the artwork visible.  One of the concepts I am using since 2000 is a myriad of adhesive tape lines I attach directly to a wall or floor, one line after the other.  It’s the idea of doing something the same or similar, step by step, again and again.  The making itself can be monotonous, repetitive, meditative, interesting, boring, like an everyday job.  It’s again doing instead of not doing, and after a while one sees something appearing while the labour itself disappears.  The work becomes independent and self-evident, normal as a table, a door, a real thing.  The difference between high and low is gone.

 

CA: The image made with tape in these wall works isn’t planned ahead, but you make it on-site in response to the wall as you encounter it.

 

DG: The recent wall works (Networks, since 2000) made with adhesive tape are based on a flexible concept.  There are a few things I plan ahead concerning the site.  The image is roughly planned as a starting-point.  With the execution of the work I get additional information from the site, which sometimes requires a change or an adaption.  I start working somewhere by mounting the tape directly to the wall.  Then a door, a window, a pipeline, a staircase and so forth blocks the flow of the work, and it forces me to respond.  This influence can change the rhythm and direction of the work.  Therefore the work links with the site directly.  This work will be different from the last one or the next one.  The continuity is in the similarity and in the difference of both the works and the sites.

 

CA: Some of your wall works cover a complete wall from side to side and floor to ceiling, and others are framed on the wall, separate from the edges.  My initial feeling about this is that a covered wall becomes an enveloping environment, whereas one that does not extend to the edges of a wall is framed somewhat like a picture on a wall.  How do you see these differences?

 

DG: Yes, it’s different.  The allover work uses the whole size and architecture of a wall or a space.  A framed work is usually built in relation to the proportions of the site, too, but the focus and the visual reading is different.  The framed work focuses the view inside the frame, where the wall is part of the work, and outside the frame is the support.  The allover work spreads in all directions; there is no focus, and the wall is a part of the work and the support at the same time.  In some installations I combine both systems—convergent and divergent views.

 

CA: Do you use a wall as you find it, or do you prepare the wall?  Do you change the color or surface texture?

 

DG: The quality of a wall or floor is part of the conditions I mentioned above.  I try to accept a space as it is at first sight.  The quality of a wall is a given; there is no reason to change it.  A dirty wall with spots, holes or scratches is site-specific; I like to include these tracks.  I make the experience so that the mounted (especially black) adhesive tape freshens up the wall as a whole spatial situation; visitors many times think that the wall has been pre-painted.  It is not the idea of a pure art work I make; it’s more a kind of collaboration between the existing and the new.  Ilya Kabakov talks about the total installation, which in my mind is a special case, since the work denies the existing space many times (dark spaces), as do some of James Turrell’s installation works, in a similar way.  It takes the viewer away from the real space he is in.  That is what I try not to do.

 

CA: One of the difficult things I would think your wall works force you to confront is the delicate balance between art and decoration, especially when a wall work is in a more public space as opposed to a space that is recognizable as a context for art.  I’m reminded of this by the Christine Mehring paper “Decoration and Abstraction in Blinky Palermo’s Wall Paintings” (Grey Room 18, Winter 2004).  What are your thoughts about art versus decoration?  Do you care about this?  Are there things that you do in the work to steer the viewer towards one way of seeing or the other?

 

DG: My concern is to build a concrete visual identification for a site, created by an art work linked to the site to evoke a situation in reality that can make sense there.  The aspects of the site influence the concept I develop.  I am interested in a work that makes the site visible through the art work, and the site makes the art work visible at the same time.  It is about the consciousness of perceiving something.  It is a communication, a give and take between equal parts creating a new, balanced entity.  It is a two-way system, different from a one-way system or a non-linked idea projected onto a so-called neutral ground, which I would understand as decoration.

 

CA: You seem to use images in the wall works and the objects that have aspects in common.  You have recently used what you call a “diamond” shape in both the wall works and the objects; it’s a four-sided shape, and sometimes it looks like a square in perspective.  Also, the objects that you have made that look like skewed crosses seem like details from the wall works where two taped lines cross at an angle.  Is this a relevant observation?  Is this a common practice for you?

 

DG: Yes, some details of a work can develop into an independent new work sometimes.  Since I like to work with basic and simple geometric forms the field is limited.  The limitation enables me to use a language with similar forms, patterns or grids in different ways.  Many times it is playing and reflecting between the same, the similar, and the different, making distinctions visible.  I usually work simultaneously on different projects.  The public works or commissioned works have specific demands.  Other works I make without a specific connection to a site, but connected between different types of my works.  It is working in a two-way system, which is reflected in work made in new ways or from a new point of view.  A prolific communication takes place between my various works.  It shows several aspects, and results in my art work as an allover entity.

 

CA: You don’t call the objects you make paintings, right? When you make these objects do you have more options than the industrial materials you use for the wall installations?  In particular, I wonder if you have more choices in terms of color, support, and surface than you do for the wall works.

 

DG: Since my background is closer to three dimensional work — sculpture and architecture — than painting, I would rather call the works objects, though some of them are very close to painting, or even are paintings.  Many of the works are built or constructed; they have a third dimension, and they have color or colored parts.  Some works are based on the distinction between the color of the support and the applied color, which is related to the example mentioned above about the wall and the applied tape for an installation.  I don’t work with a specific color system, though I use color very often.  I usually apply color flat on the surface.  The use of material, and the way a work is constructed, shaped and joined together is very interesting, and color is a factor I use very spontaneously.  Of course, there are many choices in using color for objects and paintings, and prefabricated, standardized industrial material is very limited in color and in size.  Working within these limitations and materials is challenging; it is connected to the everyday working world.  The ordinary materials and the way of making a work of art connects it to everyday working processes and techniques.

 

CA: Do you ever combine an object with a wall work?

 

DG: Sometimes I combine them.  In some cases working on a concept leads towards a combination.  Some exhibitions or sites ask for a combination of two and three dimensional work.  The tape is flat and rather two dimensional, and many objects are three dimensional.  An object mounted on the wall calls for a focused, detailed view, and an allover tape work calls for a distant and broad view.  It’s again a two-way system that simultaneously shows distinctions between an object with its own quality in any place, and the tape that only exists on a specific site.  Both are equal parts to be perceived together with the wall or site.  Using many different entities simultaneously can be an aim in the future.  I could imagine combining different or even contary movements in art (and life)—a combination of, for example, Schwitters and Judd, is not really a contradiction to me.  Of course there would be many other interesting possibilities.

 

CA: I am interested in the viewer’s experience of your work.  The wall works make an environment around the viewer, and so there is an element of time and movement in looking.  The objects are more static, more like icons that have a one-to-one physical relationship with the viewer, which is a way of looking that is not so much about movement or time, and more about stillness.  Considering the images in both the wall works and the objects, they can be split very roughly into two groups: imaes that appear to be solid objects, and those that are linear objects.  Viewing each of these is a very different experience.  To put it very simply, as a kind of concrete example, a “Diamond” work on aluminum from 2004 is like a landscape, whereas one of the shaped crosses made of MDF from 2002 is a kind of figure.  Images in the wall works can also prompt these associations, which are part of how the viewer might begin to physically and metaphorically respond to your work.  What kind of visual, physical, and metaphorical responses are you hoping to invoke with your work?

 

DG: My focus is not so much on the responses my work can invoke.  I understand the response as a result of what I do.  I would like to create a free field of associations that can lead to the viewer’s own conclusions.  Something is there without an explanation.  The art work doesn’t need a reason to be—it simply exists, like anything else in the world.  It is a realized possibility besides many other possibilities.  The art work is not a solution for something else; it is something to reflect on, and it is an independent companion.  The viewer experiences the art work immediately in real time and space.  I do not intend to make art that creates secrets or longings.  My concerns are existence, position, orientation, material, construction, proportion, distinction, repetition, contemplation, and stillness.  I like the idea of an artwork that makes sense without a reason.  

The viewer’s response begins with an exhibition.  That’s the moment when the artist’s work is finished and valid.  There is no way back, and no change possible.  The responsibility and the risk for the work is on the artist’s side.  The viewer’s response is the part coming from the outside.  As mentioned before, all elements seem to be based on a two-way system.  It’s a dualism.

The use of the terms ‘landscape’ and ‘figure’ are not very important to me.  I try not to serve this kind of looking at art.  To me it is a pre-determined way of thinking that is unimportant for my work, since my work is spatially oriented and not representational.  The terms “reductive” and “abstract” I understand in a similar way, as a derivation from something else that has been either more or bigger.  I prefer the terms ‘object’ and ‘concrete,’ which I think are the closest to what my work is.

I don’t work towards a specific aim.  I am working permanently on different projects, and they all begin anywhere in the middle of nowhere; they are not yet defined.  I understand my part of the work in developing a concept and realizing the work, and the other part of the work would be the viewer’s view, experience and response.  I understand art as a provision for life, like food and sleep.  Art speaks to the senses; it offers a wide range of contemplation the viewer can reflect on, and it can enhance his or her consciousness of things in life.  

Since visual art is basically a individual enterprise it mainly shows a single point of view towards the world.  My work is one position realized.  It is up to the viewer to get an impression of the work.  I don’t think that art necessarily has to be understood by explanation.  It is one of the free fields which is allowed to be left open.  People can take the visual experience of an art work without possessing it.  Art should not only be shown in a context of art, it should also happen in everyday places.  This is one reason why I like to work in a flexible way .  There is a difference between art lovers going to the galleries and museums, and art going to meet people.  It is a universal language for everyone.  My work is based on simple elements like a line, a field, a geometric form existing in the world already.  I use them by putting them into a new spatial context.  

It is my intension to make artwork in a concrete sense.  To me concrete means a work existing on its own, like any other thing in the world.

 

CA: Something that allows art to remain an open field, as you call it, is that it doesn’t necessarily have a practical function — it’s not useful or utilitarian in the sense that we think of when those words are applied to everyday objects.  As I understand it, the classic defintion of Konkrete Kunst, beginning with Van Doesburg and continuing through Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse, doesn’t concern itself with abstraction, and certainly possesses no symbolic meaning, but is more or less concerned with an idea expressed visually through geometry.  Is that where you begin?

 

DG: Partly yes, but for me that’s only half the story.  Art history sometimes pretends that a particular art movement is a complete entity.  Using the term “concrete” doesn’t necessarily coincide with the ideologic background of Konkrete Kunst, which was also based on ideas about society and politics.  My concern is about an entity that can also include contradictions—a yes and a no, and even a maybe.  My starting point is a synthesis of different views or positions at the same time, which to me is a spatial view.  It can be obvious or subtle, symmetric or asymmetric or both together, with or without contradiction.  It can be rule and deviation together.  Some of the earlier works I made were collages related to Kurt Schwitters’ work (Merz), any found material roughly glued onto a piece of cardboard— physical, direct, improvised, accidental, colourful, even Dadaistic.  Later, I became interested in Minimal Art, where the artwork is often precisely planned, and perfectly and clearly constructed with a defined use of materials and attention to details.  Both movements are important to me, and sometimes I see my work carrying parts of both, corresponding inbetween those two art historical position.

 

CA: Regarding the function of art, which relates to content and meaning, as I see it art objects do have functions, whether it is for description or depiction, or for contemplation, beauty, or pleasure, or a demonstration or articulation of a critical or philosophical ideal or model, and so on.  Typically, this is a visual experience, though not exclusively.  Any of these functions are part of what make an art work “a work existing on its own.” Is this part of what you mean by a concrete work, or are you more specifically referring to physical and contextual characteristics?

 

DG: The art work as “a work existing on its own” emphasizes mainly its own physical existence.  The functions you mention above are rather functions or directions for the visual experience and the use of the viewer, not necessarily functions of the art works.  Of course, the way a work is built and installed in a context can evoke different visual experiences.  The work is there because there is first a floor or a wall, a spatial situation that provides a position.  The physical work doesn’t exist in a non-space, it needs surroundings to exist.  Maybe thoughts, dreams, or an idea can exist in a non-physical space, but doesn’t it still appear in a spatial situation?

I like a work that exists on its own together with its spatial position.  This doesn’t say anything about the content of the work itself, because the whole situation is the content.  Since everybody lives in a spatial situation, the viewer can experience this freely.  Visual (and physical) perception is existential and important in everybody’s life.  My concern in art is about visual experience and perception in general: a focused view combined with a broad view; a view from above combined with a view from below or from behind; a view from the inside and from the outside; and a view from all different positions.  I try to bring them together again equally.

The following interview was published on MINUS SPACE in October 2004 in conjunction with Kevin Finklea’s spotlight exhibition.

 

Matthew Deleget: Let’s begin by talking about color, the central concern of your paintings over the past decade. You’ve worked in a pharmacy for over 20 years now, which you acknowledge has greatly affected your color sensibility. In fact, every time I see a television commercial for the acid reflux medicine, Prevacid, I think of your work. The pill design and resulting commercial are focused around two high-key colors, an intense aqua blue and a brilliant hot pink. Tell me about pharmaceuticals and color, and their influence on your work.

 

Kevin Finklea: The colors of drugs crept into my work so very long ago, that I scarcely remember the first piece I made involving those colors. I once felt the need to completely separate my studio activity from my pharmacy practice. I honestly wasn’t comfortable admitting my identity as an artist in either a corporate or professional setting. I came to realize that being an artist explained my almost total lack of what was considered normal. I take off time to work in my studio or install shows. This is not exactly the same old road being traveled by most.

Once that closet was opened I was off and running I do remember thinking that the capsules and pills I saw constituted a new source for my color. I had for many years depended upon what I will term vernacular color. Here, any colors I found in my sub-ghetto neighborhood provided me with a color source for my painted sculpture. The most common example I can give is painted out graffiti. In this circumstance any available color of paint is used to obliterate the graffiti mark. Horrid color choices often result from this activity. As every square centimeter of the neighborhood became gentrified; there was scarcely enough to work from necessitating a new color reference anyway.

Early on, in my training, it occurred to me that the colors chosen by the drug companies were pretty damned powerful. I generally count tablets and capsules on a deep cobalt turquoise counting tray (PB36 comes close to it). I have used this type of tray for over 20 years. Just about anything you pour onto such a surface is interesting. I surmise that it was specially designed by Abbott Laboratories to have just such an effect. Everything in drug world is researched and designed for your viewing pleasure. And also designed to optimize your memory of the product; thereby increasing your desire for the product in turn. You wouldn’t want to forget the name of the product at the doctor’s office when you ask for it would you? Who in this country doesn’t currently know about the little purple pill (Prilosec) or the color of Viagra?

The color of a medication is often marketed as a substance in and of itself. I don’t get to see those drug world ads that I hear about from patients as I have no television. I assure you I have more than my share of getting to see today’s hot new advertised meds. In fact, I get PR long before the drugs enter the market. Additionally, Philadelphia has a significant clinical trial setting for pharmaceuticals. Drugs are actually being used here before they are finally approved. Patients often start asking for drugs before they actually become available. It becomes a challenge to keep up on the latest releases.

 

MD: Your paintings function similar to the drugs themselves. Through their sheer intensity, they create shifts in perception, shifts in reality. They possess an almost hypnotic, or as you’ve termed it “psychotropic”, effect. Please discuss their intended impact on the viewer.

 

KF: My, I never thought I could effect such a thing. How lovely to be drug-like. It feels rather sexy and dangerous to be a drug. If only more people would want to stick me in their mouths.

This does rather point to the obvious desire loop created by drugs both legal and illegal. I don’t see the need to get into an analysis of that in this discussion. There has been more than enough literature and texts created around this observation. I would offer David Healy’s The Anti-Depressant Era as a salient example of such writing. I think the key thought here is that both pharmaceuticals and street drugs are leveled onto the same plane of desire.

As for intended impact I would hope the paintings are a tad bit unhinging. I find that people describe what I make as garish. I question this assessment and hope that the work does as well for the viewer. In presenting such high keyed chromatics along with the white work, I ultimately intend the work to be calming and quiet. Westerners just seem to respond unfavorably to pure unsullied color at this time.

I should comment that we are in an incredibly overwhelming age where the word intense has lost any true meaning. By making something that reflects this intensity, I would hope the viewer would reflect upon this in turn. Obviously I have the usual myriad of references any artist will carry at this point in history. I don’t honestly believe any viewer will pick-up on all of my personal references. How could they? If only some part comes across and or fragments thereof; then the work has succeeded for me.

For the record, I didn’t come up with the term psychotropic. It is certainly used in pharmacy and medicine, albeit not with any great frequency. It is the type of word found more readily in journals and psychiatric texts. Not my favorite type of reading mind you. Can we go back to people wanting to stick me in their mouths now?

 

MD: I find it interesting that your work subverts the traditional associations of color throughout art history. The color blue, for example, traditionally carries romantic associations with sky and sea, sadness and isolation. You, on the other hand, prefer the connotations of Komar & Melamid’s art research project, The Most Wanted Paintings, as a starting point for your work, in which they learned blue was America’s favorite color through a nationwide survey. Discuss how your work advances new associations of color.

 

KF: Well it isn’t possible to be transgressive any longer is it really? You might as well continue to mess with the past then. And because everyone knows and accepts that past; you are in effect messing with something already familiar.

It would appear that blue is the favored color of many nations. I thoroughly endorse the idea of seeing the Komar & Melamid site at Dia. Komar & Melamid weren’t the starting point for my work in blue. They simply codified what I already suspected about people’s preferences. I have to say that I find blue incredibly difficult to paint. I comment upon this in my statement for the show. I naturally go towards reds, oranges and yellows. I find I do pretty well with green as well. I recall a fabulously famous dealer in Chelsea once informing me that “yellow and green does not sell very well.” Hell, that just made me want to paint in those colors even more.

This also points up to the reason for titling the show as I did. I Wish I Could Be Your Color seemed a reasonable enough desire to state. It wasn’t any attempt to “sell very well” as it were. It is also quite contrary to my natural predilections. You could say the show has been a great challenge to paint.

 

MD: In your statements, you’ve described contemporary culture as “brutal” and “unromantic”. You also called it “overly designed hyper-aestheticized”. How has this impacted the aesthetics of your work?

 

KF: Every breathing moment of our lives are mediated and manipulated by someone wanting us to have something we don’t really need. The American landscape is exploding with advertising and media. There isn’t anything nice about this. I find that landscape littered with what I term visual pollution. This meets my criteria for brutality. And I don’t think anyone would find anything romantic in a place where someone is constantly trying to seduce me to get my money. Certainly this brutal commerce has been written about ad nauseam.

As a result I try to rid my life of the constant hammering of brutal commerce. I do my best to try to remove the hyper-aestheticized from my life as well. I did not coin the phrase hyper-aestheticized. There are numerous texts discussing the subject. The last two that I recall reading are texts by Marc Augé and Neil Leach.

As for how this has impacted my work? First of all I believe you are referring to a statement I wrote for the solo show at Pentimenti. I see the blue paintings themselves as a brutal unromantic response. As I’ve said I do see our contemporary setting as such. As for the overly designed hyper-aestheticized bit I do see myself going against the grain with the blue paintings. Changing the expected context for the color blue could be seen rather cynically as just more design work I suppose. I intend it to short circuit the expectations of the anaesthetized (read drugged) designed world.

 

MD: This year you began a new series of white paintings called Empty Pages. How do today’s circumstances differ from the time and place of Kazimir Malevich’s white paintings? Or Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings from the early 1950s? Or Robert Ryman’s first white enamel on steel paintings from the mid-1960s? How are the context and meaning different today?

 

KF: I can say that history had very little to do with my decision to make white paintings. I have been making drawings on paper with graphite and white acrylic for over 15 years. I did so to expedite my ideas for the wall pieces. I have been making actual drawings on the walls of my studio for even longer.

During my first trip to Munich I began a shelf piece with Laza marble. Laza marble is exceptionally white. I came back to my studios in Philadelphia and completed the piece by placing the marble on a shelf. The shelf I made was whitened to come close to but not match the marble. On a subsequent trip to Munich I made yet another marble piece. This was shelved as well and paired with a painted wooden wall piece. For me this is an ongoing series. I only make the work when the circumstances present themselves. Just this morning I found yet another piece of wood, upon which, I will base the production of some marble in the future. I suppose a travel grant to Munich would be in order.

My point in digressing into this is that I am perpetually involved in some type of white on white work at any given time in the studio. It is simply part of my working process. The white on white paintings were begun as a way of bringing the drawings on the wall out of the studio. These new paintings presented the challenge of making a new kind of painting (for me) on a new substrate. They are painted on acrylic panels that hover off the wall but allow you to see through them to the wall. This was a solution that contained both an established studio process with new materials in a completely novel format. The title came from a song on the first album I ever bought on my own as a kid (Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die.)

I’d have to say I can’t see cutting out parts of the wall to present in an exhibition. And as for drawing on the walls, we may see this come out of the studio into a gallery setting with this show as well. I intend to deflower one of Pentimenti’s office walls during the installation of this show. I believe this offers a personal context for the white paintings. Parenthetically, as for placing them in some historical context, that is really someone else’s task. When I began making actual paintings I knew I had to do so without historical placement or positioning. I make paintings now and for myself I might add, in relation to the time I live. There comes a point where you realize you have to loose all that art history you carry. I can tell you I nearly graduated with a double degree in art history and studio practice. I certainly had the course work. But all that really weighs you down. I liken it to coming to realize you really can fly to Europe with a carry-on bag. The excess weight just slows you down doesn’t it?

As for history I am more interested in contemporary painters. David Row, Frank Badur, Imi Knoebel, and Blinky Palermo come to mind immediately as the people I am interested in seeing. I managed to see the Palermo retrospective at the Serpentine in London twice last year. That gave me more information and contextual framework than any museum visit I’ve had in years. Yes, I know Palermo is deceased, but I still consider him a contemporary painter.

 

MD: Your Empty Pages paintings, on the other hand, approach the idea of visual overload from a completely opposing standpoint to your color-saturated Miniature paintings. In these paintings, your visual strategy is absence and emptiness. Your intention is to “empty the works of all color and image” and to represent a “cancellation of the viewer’s attention.” To what end?

 

KF: I just thought it would be good to have something quiet around after all the cacophony provided by the high keyed chromatic work. I do spend a great deal of time thinking in quiet isolation. By and large Philadelphia is a very good city for such activity and very possibly why I continue to live here. (This may be a vestige of its Quaker past.) I would like to think that this work will provide the viewer with such an experience. This is beyond the impetus behind the work’s process that I’ve described and quite a lovely collateral result. The first three works in this group will be hung by themselves in the project room at Pentimenti Gallery for the run of this show.

Here I feel I should acknowledge my thanks to two of my dealers. First and foremost I thank Christine Pfister for encouraging me to make the white paintings for the project room at Pentimenti. Secondly, I should give a nod to Emma Hill in London for first encouraging me to consider working on her gallery walls as I do in my studio. While this is something that will be first realized in Philadelphia; this is a project we’ve discussed for the future in her space at the Eagle. This points up to the ideal situation for an artist/dealer relationship. It’s very cool when a dealer allows you to run with an idea.

Honestly I don’t really believe that I can empty the color out of anything I paint. It is only an approximation of such a state that I approach in the Empty Pages work. Parenthetically, I would like to say that just about everything I paint is an approximation. A constant response to my work is its perfection. I assure you that nothing I paint is perfect. I can’t imagine a perfect painting being made by anything less than a machine. I believe that work that doesn’t absolutely manifest any particular identified attribute completely is far more interesting for its failures. In my case I know the work is not perfect. The small imperfections and variegations made by my hand make a surface far more interesting than anything I’ve even seen made by machine. I intend this to provide the viewer with a little bit more to look at than what the average dot matrix screen is capable of showing.

As for cancelling my the viewer’s attention, well that isn’t completely possible either is it? I would like to think of this as the politic of what I am trying to pull off in the white paintings. Actually I find that what I’ve achieved is a thing of great subtlety. The buried paint trapped between layers of titanium white still has a presence in the panels. There is a sense of the glow of the absent color seemingly bleeding out to the edges of the acrylic panel. I should perhaps re-term this a loss of the viewer’s attention. No one appears to respond to subtlety these days.

For the record there were no Miniatures paintings per se. Miniatures was a show I participated in at the Eagle Gallery in London. The paintings in that show were all from the Drift series which centered around psychotropic med colors. They were fantastic little paintings. I made the substrate somewhat traditionally with linen mounted on wooden panels. This seemed the perfect material for a miniature.

 

MD: I would like to spend some time talking about your process in the studio. How do you begin creating a new painting? How do you realize your ideas? Please explain.

 

KF: You have glimpse of what goes on in my studio from my comments on the Empty Pages above. New work almost always begins with what I believe I want to do with the color. I say believe as I invariably change what I begin with in a painting’s plan, sometimes painting out, repainting or counter painting an area repeatedly. Last night I worked on a very subtle warming of a light blue surface by overpainting a rather characterless synthetic manganese with the same paint infused with a nasty yellow dye color. The nasty dye color gave the blue just the right edge. I did not begin with this plan for the color really at all.

The other concern that takes as great a place as color is what the color will be painted upon. I prefer fast surfaces for painting. I look for a near total lack of resistance in the substrate. In this show I have painted on bass wood, stretched canvas, MDF and acrylic panels. I am always looking for something that will give the painting some peculiar object quality. That is to say, something I can do with the substrate that will make the painting unusual. I am showing work that varies from 6.5cm to less than 1 cm in thickness. Some of the panels have been rounded to the point that they seem almost aerodynamic.

Every painting’s composition gets drawn directly on the wall before I make the panel. I find this allows me to work out issues with scale and proportion. It also gives me a place to nail down the final composition as well. All my notes on prescription blanks and scraps of paper are very nice and get lots of attention on studio visits. They’re lousy when it comes to actually plotting out the painting.

 

MD: In your paintings, you never use more than two colors, which are precisely paired and coordinated. How do you decide on specific color pairings?

 

KF: Deciding upon the final colors I make is never certain and would be best viewed as an idiosyncratic process.

As for them being precisely paired, I don’t see it that way. I strive for a brittle balance between the colors, composition and the thing they are painted upon. I can only say I know when a painting is right. The word precise implies something measurable or objective. I don’t utilize anything of the sort when I work. I think of a painting’s color as a tunable attribute. When the color doesn’t feel right; I often think of the process as a tuning of the chromatics involved. Some paintings I get in tune instantly while others become a nightmare of overpainting and sanding. I’ve just spent most of August in this process (getting ready for this show.)

Here I realize that some reader may object to this in so much as I’ve said I use the drug colors as a source. The colors of the drugs and their juxtaposition on my PB36 counting tray are really only a starting point. I often make color notes on prescription blanks. Rather like a doctor prescribing a remedy for the work. I use those notes and observations as a place to begin mixing color. I can’t tell you how many times I get it wrong. My studio is full of shelves of mixed paint just waiting for the right painting to come along.

 

MD: Your paintings function in three dimensions. The “image” almost always wraps around the face of the painting onto its sides. How did you arrive at this solution? What does it do to the painting’s presence?

 

KF: I began making painted objects as a student. In fact, this was under the tutelage of another Minus Space participant Richard Bottwin. I was his shop slave at art school. I was in art school in the period of the end of high minimalism. This was when the art world had shifted its focus to some other hype of the moment and minimalism had begun to establish its auction records. As I student I was aware of this and so I certainly didn’t want to do what the minimalists had done. In fact seeing this horrible process made me question what had been accomplished by minimalism in the first place.

I recall that I didn’t really respond to minimalism in any personal way. I found it cool and detached. And it was quickly becoming apparent that it was fully institutionalized as an official art style. What I was interested in was suprematism and the Russian avant-garde. At the time it was almost impossible to do find any real texts or information on this period; which I can certainly attribute to cold war politics. There was the allure of something slightly off limits to me as a young art student. I consumed as much of the suprematist and constructivist materials that I could obtain at the time. And I can say that I responded to this work much more than anything being produced by the minimalists. Here I found that one could positively blur their discipline into any area of production desired. The Russians (along with the neo-plasticists) made it clear that an artist could produce anything from a drawing on up to a full installation. This thinking became my model. I concentrated on drawing and object making as a student.

I never really left my concerns with object making behind. It was in Germany that I found I wanted to shift to what I would term a concern with pure painting. I was crossing the Rhine in Cologne and saw a channel marker in the river that was absolutely riveting visually. It was flat and floating. This somehow presented me with the idea that I had to do the same thing with my work.

A bit of history is necessary in this case. I had been making objects in response to the idea of signalling devices. I was making a series of reliefs at the time called Signal and Meter. Both had to do with objects situated both in the landscape and in response to their landscape setting. Here the channel marker presented the same sort of concern but in a markedly more abstract manner than the actual objects I had been making. This, combined with my need to make pure unfettered color, provided me with the impetus to begin making paintings.

The first things I made were painted MDF panels. I felt that I had to bring what I was doing in the objects to the painting. Subsequently I painted the edges of the MDF as I had the wooden reliefs. I also made the MDF panels float on the wall, as opposed to touching or resting on the wall, as the wooden reliefs had done as well.

 

MD: The scale of your paintings is almost always modest, never larger than a few feet in either direction. Your works also possess an amazingly delicate, hand-painted surface. Talk about the importance of human scale and touch in your work.

 

KF: I honestly believe that for non-objective painting to succeed it has to relate to human scale. I believe this is a central route in connecting with the viewer. As I said, I made painted objects before I shifted my current focus to pure paintings. The forms produced were completely based upon measurements of my own body. These were painted wooden reliefs that hung on the wall. I found time and time again that during the run of a show, the paint would often be rubbed off of the edges of the objects. Here I can only surmise that viewers felt compelled to touch the objects to complete the experience of seeing the object. So much for the don’t touch bit, eh? Rather than being annoying I found this a positive response to what I had done.

Additionally I would have to say that I couldn’t paint anything without a sense of my hand being in the completed work. Again this offers the possibility of a viewer connecting with the painting. And I would hope that the hand painted quality of the surface would lend vulnerability (yes, a much over used expression, but still appropriate) to what would seem otherwise impenetrable.

 

MD: And finally, how do you see abstract painting developing today? In which direction do you see heading? Where do you perceive there to be room for future exploration?

 

KF: Many people pretend to see the future. I don’t indulge myself in future fantasies where painting is concerned. I honestly believe that non-objective painting will continue to respond to present circumstances and change accordingly. I really truly prefer to be painting in the present. I can’t say I worry about either the future or anticipating what the next big thing will be in painting. I would have to also comment that any new developments in non-objective painting will occur in relative obscurity. Here I am recalling a comment made by Bridget Riley in an article she wrote for The Illustrated London News in 1983:

“I think it very probable that in the future there may be a divergence of paths [in the visual arts]: one tendency will come more and more to resemble the world of pop music, with group following group or movement following movement, supported by a vast promotional structure. Simultaneously, genuine development will tend to go underground (my italics). Thus the Western World will produce an inversion of the effect of totalitarianism, with commercialism replacing party ideology as the dominant factor…”

There is more to this quote and it can be found in The Eye’s Mind. I am quite certain that non-objectivity will continue to develop. Its emergence in the 20th century is a relatively recent cultural event. How could anyone begin to pretend that it is either complete or over as it were. There exists a seemingly endless parade of nay sayers where painting is concerned. I find that this is often the symptom of hidden agendas and professional concerns. Curators and critics always get heaps of attention when they decree the death of painting every decade don’t they? Nihilists have always appeared to me as self-centered and frankly rather boring.