The painter Rolf Rose, who lives near Hamburg, describes the coarse industrial spatula with which he applies the colors of his pictures as his “extended hand”. The tool organizes the “chaotic mass of paint” explains the autodidact, who works non-representationally and was inspired by American color field painting. This trend, which developed in the 1950s and 1960s, banished the object and content-oriented representation from art.
Instead, the color itself, with its diverse properties and material experience, became the subject of the picture. In Rose’s work, too, the thickly applied color substance takes on a life of its own and is systematically ordered and tamed by the artist with a spatula.
On the occasion of Rolf Rose’s 90th birthday, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is showing the group exhibition “No Illusions. Painting in Space”, in which seven works by the jubilarian can be seen. The partly strict, partly dynamic pictures tell of different creative phases: The early pictures, applied to plywood with oil, wax and graphite, remain monochrome, while the most recent works are characterized by explosions of colour.
“We are in the age of conceptual painting that primarily reports on itself,” says Alexander Klar, director of the art gallery, who curated the show. The museum director brought nine contemporary positions together in the Gallery of Contemporary Art. Like Rose, each of the painters presented, including Ingo Meller, Cornelia Baltes and Franziska Reinbothe, has said goodbye to the art of concrete depiction. Instead of figure or nature, object or event, the artists address pictorial concepts and methods as well as material and spatial effects. “Strictly speaking, the pictures have no meaning. They are a statement,” explains Klar.
Some of the around 60 works on display were purchased in recent years, while others were created especially for the Kunsthalle and are designed to fit the first floor of the cubic building, which is flooded with daylight. The artist Shila Khatami from Saarbrücken, for example, has creatively appropriated a large area of the exhibition space with obvious joy. “It has been my dream for a long time to design an entire room,” says the painter, who was influenced by Constructivism and Bauhaus and whose non-representational pictures are created on industrially manufactured material. She clad an area of the museum floor and two partition walls with checker plates so that the viewer can enter the work and become part of the art space.
Like Rose, Khatami does not paint with a brush, but rather applies her mostly white or black color areas or color strips to the unorthodox painting surface with a large-area roller. In the current work, the color acts as a signpost and directs the gaze to the vanishing point in the newly created space. “It’s supposed to look as if it’s been thrown on, but it’s well-composed,” says the painter about her method of applying paint. The room light also plays a role in their concept, because the ceiling lighting is reflected in the metal, diagonally ribbed surface. “I wanted to give the industrial material something poetic and transcendental,” explains the artist, who called her work “Tear Sheet”.
The other positions also assert themselves in the daylight room of the Gallery of Contemporary Art, where the uncovered windows offer a panoramic view of the Inner Alster, the railway tracks and the urban space. Helga Schmidhuber’s work seems to correspond with the urban landscape in which nature has been ordered by man. Although the artist paints and prints animals and plants on fabric and canvas, the creatures used ornamentally lack their natural context. The painter uses an entire wall as a picture surface, on which she arranges various parts of the work to form an overall composition. “Painting and assemblage are brought together in a collage-like form,” says Klar.
There is no conventional panel painting in the exhibition. Most works penetrate the space in some way. The curator describes the three-dimensional works by Munich-based artist Dominik Halmer as painted experimental objects. Among other things, you can see a strange piece of furniture that does not resemble any known piece of furniture. A painted canvas and an artificial, oversized blackberry lie within this narrow box-shaped wooden object on legs.
The exhibition, which is worth experiencing, teaches that painting is the product of an artistic thought process and reflects subjective ideas and concepts. One way of becoming aware of these inner images was already known to Leonardo da Vinci, says Rolf Rose: “If you throw a sponge soaked in paint on the wall and look at the resulting spot, then a suggestive effect unfolds. The stain awakens mental images that you carry within you.”
