ISA-genzken exhibition-“Basic Research” in Berlin: Abstraction on the ground

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin-Charlottenburg, Fasanenstraße: We enter a chic bourgeois house, there is red carpeting, it goes to the first floor, the heavy door is already open. This is where the exhibition »Isa Genzken begins. Basic Research «with a passionate, on both sides, to see nothing but to see yourself and abstract wall. I, wherever the eye looks, you don’t have much space, but infinity is suggested by the old mirror magic.

At the end of the path there is a grading stand, on which no score is waiting, but a collage, black and white photographs from old magazines about the fascination of space travel: a picture of the Gemini 9 room capsule, one by Alan Shepard, the first ami in space, a test missile somewhere in the event of the USA. The pictures are kinked, glued, a strip of many small gold four -ceilings is mounted on the top of the note, but the small lamp is out. The infinite space as a mirror cabinet, the star stand of the star as a shelf for old reports – Genzkens Work »Oil VIII« from 2007, originally designed for the Venice Biennale, pulls the floor under their feet.

It is already the 17th solo exhibition by Isa Genzken in the Buchholz gallery. In the summer of 2023, the new National Gallery in Berlin devoted her to a retrospective in 75 objects for the 75th birthday. The New York Museum of Modern Art had already organized such a homage for her ten years earlier. Daniel Buchholz did his first exhibition with Genzken in 1987 in Cologne; At that time she was married to Gerhard Richter, where she also studied in Düsseldorf. In the following decades, Genzken became an art world star, is usually understood as a sculptor, but does not determine any medium.

Nevertheless, surprising that the works exhibited as “Basic Reserach” are now oil paintings. This “basic research” was created from 1988 to 1992, actually on the ground: Genzken spreads the canvas on the ground, adds oil and rolls off. The frottage process ensures that prints of your working floor become non-related painting. Abstraction is often a hasty assumption. The impression can arise from certain distances, the images showed satellite shots of stone deserts or organic green areas. A microscope perspective would also be conceivable. In any case, these pictures do not serve to orientate subjective condition. In the accompanying text you can find out from the “dust breeding” of Marcel Duchamps in his studio, which was photographed by MAN Ray for the magazine “Littérature” more than 100 years ago. All particles.

The fact that the materiality, the made of the uneven surfaces of the non -smoothed workshop world jump into the face, prevents the endless individual projections from the viewer, which can trigger clean color field painting. The pictures are monochrome, but the structures from the frottage bring movement to the screen, do not offer a clear perspective, but space. All sorts of traces are in the pictures: fat blobs, thicker and thinner streaks are reminiscent of unclean manufacturing processes. You are not dealing with transcendent things here, but results from physical work, intended by -products, obtained from the condition of the workshop if you will.

If you get involved in spending some time with this work, questions of the format, the frame, gradually become an urgent matter. It takes peculiar effects if the entire canvas is not painted, but edges remain white, where you could have turned the illusion in front of the work, you look at a moon mountains, a jungle. “Basic Research” also includes some leaves, small -format, which, in their decent framework, almost like a forced, handy abstract art for space -saving buyers work alongside the larger, free, without frame. Others suddenly remind you of walls, somehow the colors appear to be messed up elsewhere and the monochromy is broken. Against the cheeky look: Genzken’s simple frottage process does not ensure simple pictures that ensure occasion to explore occasions, vision, depicting, depicting, abstracting in the selection and hanging in the Buchholz gallery.

Isa Genzken: “Basic Research”. Buchholz Gallery, Fasanenstraße 30, Berlin, until April 12th