print November 1990

Peter Bonde

Most people feel some slight anxiety when viewing the works of Danish artist Peter Bonde. Who wants to look at work that seems a desperate attempt to maintain a “critical” art by all sorts of antiquated means such as sculpture and painting? Bonde stubbornly (and sometimes perhaps too directly) insists that such an art must exist, and, he goes about inventing the space for it, so that the art action constitutes the core of his project.

At the same time he continues to wage a struggle for self-respect as an artist, entangling himself in his own scenarios. Puttering about in an attempt to transform

print October 1990

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Do images register in our minds more readily than words? How do verbal and visual memories relate to each other? How can the expertise of a professional mnemonician help us to see and perceive? Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s work does not only approach such issues with respect to the viewing of art; her work directly embodies those operations. Entitled “The Mind of a Mnemonician,” this show attacked the usual modes of perception, such as the application of methods from other fields—psychoanalysis, philosophy, and sociology. The exhibition is a memory of memory experiments undertaken in the 1920s

print May 1990

Peter Nadin

What is painting after? Here we have an artist and an exhibition that relentlessly pose this question. Can painting exist today except by reflecting on itself? It doesn’t want to exceed itself, but it must in order to accommodate the world, human beings, and even the conditions of art’s production.

Peter Nadin’s paintings resemble equations that ultimately exist only in order to introduce a “genuine” unknown quantity. The goal is not to solve the equation, but to construct it; not only to limit but also to expand the unknowns. Imagine all the things one can do with x, with the unknown. Imagine

print May 1990

Georg Baselitz

What is painting after? Memory and organization. To dissolve, to constitute itself. To do something vicariously for others or for itself? To capture a special kind of reminiscence—personal history, time spent with painting, the resulting disillusionment because painting as the trace of genius is all that remains.

Georg Baselitz’s new work is both monumental and light at the same time. It fills an entire room, but is neither massive nor monolithic. Instead, it is decentralized in a series of 20 individual components that form a continuous strip of pictures. In the catalogue, Siegfried Gohr calls

print March 1990

Philip Pearlstein

The works of Philip Pearlstein are difficult all around. Mannerism, kitsch, and Pop art combine with objects that are painted realistically, even hyperrealistically; abstractly composed still lifes coalesce with nudes and juicy symbolic overtones. Pearlstein flaunts his painterly expertise in these interior studio scenes. This is direct painting with no spark of inspiration springing across the canvas; these scenes implode silently. The naked figures are accompanied, for example, by wooden toys, wooden tables, mirrors, statues, and a red model airplane. The subjects’ poses are always attuned to

print February 1990

Peter Zimmerman

The desire to speak in a painting? Practicing the desire to paint, the “concreteness that has been depicted,” in a speaking painting? The man who wants all this is the Conceptual painter Peter Zimmermann, who, since 1987, has been depicting book covers as paintings. There’s nothing wrong here: he cleverly chooses the titles, which all come from books of the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s. These books include several atlases, An Introduction to Modern Linguistics, Abstraction and Empathy, Michelin and Baedeker guides, as well as how-to books like Think and Get Rich and Wallpapering Today. These titles

print January 1990

Piotr Nathan

Piotr Nathan aims at reaching a truth behind the objectivist, universalist, fetishistic demands of the modern art object. Through Nathan’s objects, we experience how meaning is made, how material fetishism arises. But at the same time, we are ensnared, compelled to roam about, dumbfounded by the grandiloquent, brutal aspects of the objects themselves. Nathan makes himself vulnerable, fearing neither obviousness nor contradictions. The titles of his pieces and the arrangement of this exhibition (which offers works from the past seven years—almost a miniretrospective) confirm the impression that

print October 1989

Peter Bömmels

“Furniere der Schatz” (Veneer the treasure): like all Peter Bömmels’ exhibitions, this one focused on the content of the works. On display were 40 small works (all 1989) painted on fine, frail veneer leaves, that were divided into ten sections, each with a mock-serious title. Here, Bömmels uses real, not mythical subjects, that refer to functions, differences, and problems of gender, belief, art, and politics. Humor runs as a current through many of the works, as, for example, in Künstler transzendiert Zebrastreifen (Artist transcends zebra crossing). Bömmels is an artistic autodidact with

print March 1989

Hinrich Weidemann

Hinrich Weidemann explores the concept of the interior through his collectively installed drawings, rendered in fragile pencil strokes and with brush traces in india ink. One could almost call these works withdrawn and modest if they didn’t insist with all their might that the issue of a picture’s autonomy has not been resolved, that it must be reintroduced in a new way—in the face of the possibly endless repetition of the artwork. Weidemann plays the part of the European, whose efforts at cracking the dead system he assumes without provocation. Yet, amazingly, he offers convincing forms, which

print February 1989

Robert Gober

Recently Robert Gober’s sink was a favorite object of interpretation, a thing that offered a new surface for projection and reference (Marcel Duchamp, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, to name merely the cornerstones). Exposure, disease, the unconscious, archetypes of culture, symbols of existence—all these have been read into the sink. What next? Nevertheless, Gober managed, in these exhibitions, to discard the notion that we are living in a stage of aftermath. He shows us a balancing act, and also states its necessity—cautiously and sincerely.

Most of Gober’s objects are handmade or at least visibly

print January 1989

Candida Hofer

Candida Höfer was a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose reductionist approach to photography has exerted a tremendous influence on recent German art. Indeed, the Bechers have had such a strong impact that their disciples have often had to struggle with the couple’s rationally “correct” stance for the rest of their lives. Despite the authority of the Bechers, Höfer has managed to take a slow, quiet, and thoughtful detour.

Her subject is limited to interiors, which are never stripped of their distinctiveness by rigorously formal photographic methods. More specifically, Hölfer shoots informal

print October 1988

Albert Oehlen

The paintings in this exhibition don’t have titles, just small parenthetical indications that serve to identify them, such as “American flag,” “Lichtenstein,” “Weapon,” “Cross,” and “Street.” Not only do they offer disclaimers of classical techniques (for example, the flag painting alludes to Jasper Johns), they also stabilize the artist’s work. The path Albert Oehlen has taken is made up of countless salient advances, activities (including nonartistic ones), and revisions, which, almost imperceptibly, but more and more powerfully, have exposed one of today’s most convincing responses to the

Jutta Koether