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Open Art - Exhibition: Jens Wolf
from Sep 8th, 2006 until Oct 25th, 2006
Jens Wolf plays with the language of reductive, geometric abstraction: The forms are familiar, but their realization is not. The references are clear—allusions abound to hard-edge painting, systemic painting, and constructivism—and the paintings are antisubjective, avoid an easily identified "signature," and demonstrate the concept of "flatness" popularized by Clement Greenberg, all while evoking Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, or Max Bill and František Kupka. However, Wolf's iterations chart a different path, using this formal vocabulary as an aesthetically coded point of departure rather than as an end in itself. Wolf keeps his pictures simple, placing linear strips of color or intersecting circular forms onto boards of unprimed plywood. But these rudimentary shapes have torn corners; they are frayed and fragmented. Here, the artist has created his first wall painting for a gallery exhibition: A band of horizontal strips of color of different widths stretches at eye level across two adjacent walls and a corner of the room. The "painting" here is merely the optical residue of a process of adding and subtracting elements (black fabric, adhesive tape, strips of aluminum foil) from the surface. Wolf practices a Trojan-horse Minimalism, in which the material deconstruction contradicts the overall formal structures, making productive use of both the tradition and its decomposition.
Jens Asthoff |
