MINIMALISM AND AFTER II
New Aquisitions
John M Armleder, Richard Artschwager, Wolfgang Berkowski, Stephen Bram, Daniel Buren, Ian Burn, Hanne Darboven, Gene Davis, Hermann Glöckner, Benoit Gollety, Katharina Grosse, Esther Hiepler, Sol LeWitt, John McLaughlin, Olivier Mosset, David Novros, Charlotte Posenenske, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Henryk Stazewski, Katja Strunz, Michael Zahn.
Daimler Contemporary
February 14
- May 18, 2003
new opening hours:
daily 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Michael Zahn
*1963 in Cleveland, USA, lebt in New York, USAUntitled (Palette with Objects), 2002
Acrylic on acrylic glass, 3 partsSix animations, 2002
6 DVDs, 6 DVD-player, 6 monitors, on plinth and floor slabUntitled, 1986
Oil on canvas
Michael Zahn
*1963 in Cleveland, USA, lives in New York, USAUntitled (Palette with Objects), 2002
Acrylic on acrylic glass, 3 partsUntitled (Palette with Objects) is a three-panel work, the largest of which represents the color palette of a graphics program such as Illustrator or Photoshop; the two smaller panels refer obliquely to tools like brushes, pens, or blades. The color palette, referencing pictorial themes from Marcel Duchamp's Tu M' to early works of Ellsworth Kelly and the industrial charts of Gerhard Richter, is not, however, a readymade, but is an interpretation of an artist's palette rendered in terms of color itself. The overall structure of the color palette, with its subtle gradations of violet, green, orange, and red, among other hues, plays with the idea of a mirror reflection composed around a center axis.
Michael Zahn's paintings confront the onlooker with a generalized abstract structure of the computer screen. The literal and existential emptiness of these pictures illustrates the idleness of communication, which thus remains one-dimensional and autistic, and leads in a single direction, from the program to the user.
Gerwald Rockenschaub
*1952 in Vienna, A, lives in Berlin, DSix animations, 2002
6 DVDs, 6 DVD-player, 6 monitors, on plinth and floor slabThe video installation six animations translates a constructive and synthetic pictorial language into colorfully »poppy« computer animations. The standardized, static compositional principle of abstraction are animated, refracted by means of combination and variation and transfered into a crossover of graphics and techno-music. Rockenschaub's six animations makes it clear how strongly the pictorial reservoir of art has now been taken over by the mass media. Constantly improving technical resources lead to ever more perfect products for which art history is only the aesthetic of goods. The abstract and geometrical art of the 20th century becomes a model supplier for fashion, graphics, and design, and enjoys a great deal of popularity, but paradoxically it remains alien to most people as art. Thus it is clear only in the context of minimalistic tradition that the reduced form of the video installation not only reflects the world-standard shop design from Sony to Prada, but has its origins in Minimal Art sculptures.
Untitled, 1986
Oil on canvasIn the mid 80s Gerwald Rockenschaub was one of a group of young, international artists concerned with the formal language of the abstract avant-garde. »Neo Geo« permeated the reduced formal language of Minimal Art with Pop Art's permissive and consumerist approach. Gerwald Rockenschaub's model-like, small-format works produced in the eighties appropriated abstraction without wishing to confer a historical quality on it. They do not lead to any sort of discourse in terms of content, nor does their cool neutrality link up with questions relating to painting on the formal plane. He sees them as a »form of representation and play, as a possibility for making artistic statements in model form«. (G. R.). And so his images are no longer driven by the social or metaphysical Utopias of the pioneers of abstraction, but by codes and patterns that have established themselves in the everyday world. They are pictograms that, apart from music, do not refer to any special socio-cultural or symbolic context.
