The seriality of Anne Loch’s work is essential to her conceptual project and also reveals her work’s connection to kitsch and the conventions of landscape. Loch’s new, large-format paintings pose the question of painting’s own legitimation in an idiosyncratic, yet obvious way. At first, they seem to have taken an individual path: pictures of deer against a pink background, tinged red at the edge; red rose blossoms—schematic diagrams made geometric on a black background; giant grapes, leaf and crystal formations, all demonstrate the artist’s direct confrontation with the environment.

Monumental, schematic, flatly painted, exaggerated in scale, these paintings seem to create a context that can be intelligently ordered. Pictures of this type are like independent beings that come together in order to comment on the representation of Being in contemporary painting.

As individual works, though, they seem weak. Grouping these paintings together into a whole rather than emphasizing single works allows for the revelation of sources and replaces the singular experience of an individual work with an esthetic of change—the differentiation between an ideal pattern in an individual work and the system of the entire exhibition, perhaps even a dialogue between the two. It is carried primarily by Loch’s seemingly objective, emotionally distant relationship to the conventions of landscape painting. Starting with realism, she quotes the fragmentation and conscious deformation of the forms of nature until they are completely negated, thereby pointing toward an imaginary, intellectualized nature.

—Norbert Messler

Translated from the German by Charles V. Miller.