in The Gallery
Wolfram Ullrich
FLOAT

in The Safe
Stefan Annerel, Andrew Graves, John Phillips

John Philips:

If I were a shopping center
I’d sure be embarrassed,
I know I’d never get a date…
with some cute little building,
like from Paris.
- Jonathan Richman


John Phillips has remarked that if Barnett Newman had owned a lava lamp, it might have looked like one of his own paintings. Indeed, Phillips’s inimical mix of serious-minded abstraction and eye-hugging visual entertainment does seem to borrow equally from these vastly different arenas. Throughout his extensive body of work, there is a certain inevitability in his brilliant fields of color populated by skillfully composed, astutely drawn figures. The seem as "natural" as the shopping mall mentioned above,
but like in Richman’s personification, they aspire to better company than usually expected: they can pass for a more upscale company, more like those pictures from Paris.

Stefan Annerel:

It's like standing with your nose against the wall. You can see the wall, yet at the same time you can't. You can see its colour, its structure, but the wall itself remains hidden. This brings to mind another situation: it's possible to focus so hard on something, that you no longer know what you are focussing on—the image in your mind does not become clearer, rather it tends to become blurred. It's like when you concentrate very hard on a particular thought, and as a result you lose it, like it detaches itself from you. Actually, blurriness need not be the contrary of clarity: it can also be an extension of clarity—an emphatic clarity that results from an utterly consequent form of thinking that causes the clarity to evaporate.

A similar structure underlies the art of Stefan Annerel (b. 1970). Annerel isolates motifs he borrows from everyday images (advertisement photographs, patterns of textiles,... i.e. all sorts of images trouvées) and blows them up to such a size that they are no longer recognisable. Or rather: to such a size that they just become unrecognisable, because looking at these images amounts to balancing between seeing and not seeing, to anticipating the slight shock of sudden recognition, which, however, usually does not follow—but only just. Annerel's images are like words that are on the tip of one's tongue. And there they stay, eluding us. It's like being almost happy, because we almost overcome a failing memory.

Wolfram Ullrich:

Wolfram Ullrich occupies a unique position in contemporary art.
He creates artefacts involving a synthesis of tradition and innovation.
Ullrich works with a formal vocabulary that is grounded in geometric abstract art, the origins of which can be traced in turn to classical Constructivism – a current that emerged in several different schools of art during the second decade of the 1900’s, among them Russian Suprematism (as embodied in the work of Kamisir Malevich, for example) and the Dutch ‘De Stijl’-movement (as exemplified by Piet Mondrian).
What these two stylistic currents had in common was the goal of breaking away from realistic depiction of the visible world. Artists were no longer interested in rendering things as they saw them. They strove instead to create a new world of visual imagery using abstract, geometric forms –
a pictorial world that was its own subject and its own meaning, expressed as pure colour, pure form. The works of Wolfram Ullrich bear eloquent witness to the vitality and complexity of Constructivist art in our own time. All of Wolfram Ullrich’s works share the clarity and rigour of Constructivist formal language, which avoids embellishment of any kind. Tight angles and clearly defined forms dominate his compositions. It is a style of art which – though often declared dead – has lost nothing of its freshness and vitality.

Andrew Graves:

Andrew Graves makes paintings that sit at the edge of what is recognisable, yet at the moment when revelation seems imminent they shift and blur. They contain a promise that at some point, soon, their nature will become clear, their meaning unfolded.

What dictates their forms? What logic informs their selection? Perhaps the imagery is somehow pre-selected by the materials of each paintings construction. Chalk gesso boards produce a surface that seem to both absorb and reflect light, and when its flat surface is stained and rubbed with colour it seems to produce a paradoxical plane which offers both flatness and depth.

Yet they are not exercises in virtuosity, each work uses only the minimal technique to bring them towards an idea. At what point does something become a painting, what decisions make someone a painter?