Painting of Uncertain Places

27.07.2012 — 16.09.2012

Painting not only dominates the art market but also easily accounts for the greatest share of contemporary art production. It is therefore remarkable that exhibitions devoted exclusively to painting, or ones that include it in curated group exhibitions, are rarely organized. Nine years after the highly successful exhibition “deutschemalereizweitausenddrei” (2003), the Frankfurter Kunstverein is once again presenting a painting exhibition for summer 2012. Entitled “Painting from Uncertain Places”, it will present four painters, Tilo Baumgärtel (Leipzig), Susanne Kühn (Freiburg), Antje Majewski (Berlin), and Hannes Michanek (Frankfurt), who are conscious of the often subordinated fetish character of figurative painting. Their works make tangible the hidden potential such art possesses for depicting the world.
Centered around painting’s capacity to create illusion, the panels and painterly designs of these artists avoid referencing contemporary social concerns in a superficial way, thus enabling them to focus more exclusively on examining the role of the individual in the world through the use of metaphorical or allegorical compositions. Presented are make-believe worlds of a quasi-natural, cultural, or social variety, seemingly unknown and therefore open to interpretation. They are visions of imaginary worlds that interrupt the continuum of history to express a sense of the present rather than analyzing this critically. They are loose (counter) representations of time.

In abstaining from posing concrete questions, “Painting of Uncertain Places” expresses precisely those ideas that cannot be clarified through abstraction, offering instead figuration as a space for rumination. Common among the pictures presented in the exhibition are human figures in unknown realms–landscapes, interiors or dreamlike spaces – whose unspecified status allows them to serve as testing grounds for drawing associations to everyday contexts: they can be read as bearers of broader ideas.

The exhibition has been presented over all exhibition areas (800 square meters) of the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Each artist’s body of work was presented in its own area of the space and feature numerous individuals works and series of works corresponding to the theme of the exhibition.

Curator: Holger Kube Ventura