Jutta Koether

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  print October 1988

  Asta Gröting

  The absence of content is iridescent in these untitled works by Asta Gröting. They do not announce a new direction, nor do they produce spectacular effects, but they are astonishing. One is amazed by, say, the elegance with which the artist arranges and juxtaposes materials, such as dried sunflowers with a Plexiglas vessel containing a glass pane. One is similarly amazed by a screen of shaped Plexiglas, standing on a custom-made chromium base; a brownish spot, the size of a cow pat, is placed on either side, and inside it, we can see the glass bodies that Gröting often uses. These bodies, with

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  print September 1988

  Isa Genzenken

  Isa Genzken is known for the way she subtly relates her works to their environments, as well as for her complex, specific solutions and disruptive tactics. She has consistently employed materials from the realm of building construction: first wood and plaster, then glass and steel, and now concrete. Sculptures made of broken, shattered, and imperfect concrete are supported by delicate iron scaffolds. Genzken pours the concrete into wooden frameworks; when it hardens, she smashes it, then piles up the fragments again. Then the components are lightly spray-painted.

  The manner in which the pieces

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  print Summer 1988

  Anne Loch

  For many years now, Anne Loch has been painting only landscapes, and almost never any human beings. At most, an animal may stray into one of her landscapes—as in the picture featuring a herd of buffalo (shown at the Kunstverein in Bonn) or the impressive depiction of an eagle perching on a mountain peak against a radiant blue background (at Monika Sprüth). The exhibition in Bonn consisted almost entirely of a series of mountain landscapes and a series of flower paintings, all painted in 1987. In each of the former, the mountain always looks the same while the color of the background is different;

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  print Summer 1988

  Julio Rondo

  In his first large solo exhibition, Julio Rondo, a Spaniard living in West Germany, exhibited nine new works, all from 1988. These six single-canvas paintings and three triptychs are, in a sense, “double” paintings. Their composition, influenced by the strategies of graphic design, is conceptual, yet reveals a kind of self-conceived innocence. With restraint and simplicity, these works ask about the value and validity of painting, while reflecting a comfort with the transitional moment in art from which such questions emerge.

  Each work actually consists of two paintings: one in oil pastel on

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  print May 1988

  Walter Dahn

  This year in his solo show here Walter Dahn presented 11 acrylic paintings, some of them in very large formats. His latest works can be regarded as a daring stage of a journey that he himself calls “the road away from painting as painting.” This road has taken him from neo-Expressionist painterly painting to spray painting, photography, silkscreen, and a blend of silkscreen and painting, through a broad range of alienation “themes” and techniques, including the precise duplication of signs from a dictionary of symbols, using photocopies enlarged several times over and a projector. The ultimate

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  print March 1988

  Thomas Grunfeld

  At his fifth solo exhibition at this gallery, Thomas Grünfeld presented a group of works from 1986 and ’87 that he has described as “fragments of interior design” or “seven prototypes of form invention.” These included objects based on different kinds of furniture (including examples of what he calls “alienated furniture”) and various types of frames. He has presented similar kinds of objects at various shows over the past few years; now, gathered together in a single show—and with several additions and refinements—these were offered as a kind of repertoire. The changes are twofold. Unlike

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  print December 1987

  Alex Kasseböhmer

  The 12 paintings in this exhibition by the Düsseldorf artist Axel Kasseböhmer were related by a single concept. This was a continuation of a principle elaborated in his earlier works: that an artist’s ideas about theoretical issues of painting should be recognizable in his or her style. As before, these new paintings (from 1987) focus on the possibilities of the still life. But while the paintings in his previous exhibitions incorporated familiar elements of the works of well-known artists (from Zurburán’s light to Picasso’s animal skulls), here he has combined various styles of 20th-century