Anri Sala’s video Byrek, 2000—named after a traditional Albanian salted pastry—shows the hands and forearms of an elderly woman kneading a batch of dough with the precise motions of a much-practiced routine. She rolls the dough out until it is very thin; it occupies nearly the whole screen. She then fills it with cheese, meat, and spinach, rolls it into a spiral shape, and finally places it inside a round baking pan. The camera follows this procedure from a single angle, only occasionally turning toward the window as an airplane makes its track across the sky. The woman’s wordless, ritual-like

How is color to be applied to a surface? Günter Umberg, an artist living in Cologne, has been asking that question for thirty years now. In the process he has concentrated on a single color, black, with occasional forays into others. Until about 1978, Umberg mixed his pigment with damar resin before applying it layer by layer to a wood panel, sanding each layer before applying the next. To achieve even greater depth, he then changed his painting method. Today he brushes the dry pigment directly into a moist layer of damar previously applied to the panel, often mixing other colors into the base