September 17 – October 31, 2009
In Memory of Painting 3: Nikolas Gambaroff
In Memory of Painting 3:
Nikolas Gambaroff
http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2008/12/nikolas-gambaroff-ei-arakawa-at-balice-hertling/
http://www.textezurkunst.de/73/crisis-manuals-de/
Buecherliste in no particular order some directly painting related and some indirectly:
The ground of the image: Jean-Luc Nancy
Critical limits, and function of the studio : Daniel Buren (Essays)
Logik der Sensation: Gilles Deleuze
Painting as model: Yve-Alain Bois
Die leibhaftige Malerei: Georges-Didi Huberman
Archive Fever: Jacques Derrida
Kathy Acker: Hannibal Lecter, My Father
Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen/The future of the image: Jacques Ranciere
A grammar of the multitude: Paolo Virno
Interviews with Kippenberger: Jutta Koether
Selected Writings: Agnes Martin
Rosalind Kraus: Grids (Essay)
Jean Clay: Painting in Shreds, and Ointment, makeup, pollen (Essays)
Benjamin Buchloh: The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde (Essay)
Thiery de Duve: Joseph Beuys, or The Last of the Proletarians; Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected; Yves Klein, or The Dead Dealer; Marcel Duchamp, or The "Phynancier" of Modern Life (Essays)
Alain Robbe-Grillet: The erasers, Jealousy
Chris Kraus: I Love Dick
Raymond Roussel: Locus Solus
Fernando Pessoa: Das Buch der Unruhe
Melanie Klein: Collected Writings, Envy and Gratitude
Martha Rosler: Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Essays 1975-2001
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
Unica Zurn: Der Mann im Jasmin
Valerie Solanas: Scum Manifesto
Four poems (maybe concrete) for F. K.
Nikolas Gambaroff*
(click to download pdf)
Nikolas Gambaroff
http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2008/12/nikolas-gambaroff-ei-arakawa-at-balice-hertling/
http://www.textezurkunst.de/73/crisis-manuals-de/
Buecherliste in no particular order some directly painting related and some indirectly:
The ground of the image: Jean-Luc Nancy
Critical limits, and function of the studio : Daniel Buren (Essays)
Logik der Sensation: Gilles Deleuze
Painting as model: Yve-Alain Bois
Die leibhaftige Malerei: Georges-Didi Huberman
Archive Fever: Jacques Derrida
Kathy Acker: Hannibal Lecter, My Father
Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen/The future of the image: Jacques Ranciere
A grammar of the multitude: Paolo Virno
Interviews with Kippenberger: Jutta Koether
Selected Writings: Agnes Martin
Rosalind Kraus: Grids (Essay)
Jean Clay: Painting in Shreds, and Ointment, makeup, pollen (Essays)
Benjamin Buchloh: The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde (Essay)
Thiery de Duve: Joseph Beuys, or The Last of the Proletarians; Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected; Yves Klein, or The Dead Dealer; Marcel Duchamp, or The "Phynancier" of Modern Life (Essays)
Alain Robbe-Grillet: The erasers, Jealousy
Chris Kraus: I Love Dick
Raymond Roussel: Locus Solus
Fernando Pessoa: Das Buch der Unruhe
Melanie Klein: Collected Writings, Envy and Gratitude
Martha Rosler: Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Essays 1975-2001
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
Unica Zurn: Der Mann im Jasmin
Valerie Solanas: Scum Manifesto
Four poems (maybe concrete) for F. K.
Nikolas Gambaroff*
(click to download pdf)
Nikolas Gambaroff
Installation view
Layr Wuestenhagen, 2009
Installation view
Layr Wuestenhagen, 2009
Nikolas Gambaroff
Installation view
Layr Wuestenhagen, 2009
Installation view
Layr Wuestenhagen, 2009
Nikolas Gambaroff
Installation view
Layr Wuestenhagen, 2009
Installation view
Layr Wuestenhagen, 2009
Nikolas Gambaroff
Untitled, 2009 (Installation view)
Oil on linen, 122 x 92 cm
Untitled, 2009 (Installation view)
Oil on linen, 122 x 92 cm
Nikolas Gambaroff
Untitled, 2009 (Installation view)
Oil on linen, 122 x 92 cm
Untitled, 2009 (Installation view)
Oil on linen, 122 x 92 cm
Nikolas Gambaroff
Untitled, 2009 (Installation view)
Oil on linen, 122 x 92 cm
Untitled, 2009 (Installation view)
Oil on linen, 122 x 92 cm
Nikolas Gambaroff
Untitled, 2009 (Installation view)
Oil on linen, 122 x 92 cm
Untitled, 2009 (Installation view)
Oil on linen, 122 x 92 cm
Nikolas Gambaroff
Installation view
Layr Wuestenhagen, 2009
Installation view
Layr Wuestenhagen, 2009
Nikolas Gambaroff
Untitled, 2009
Oil on paper, 63 x 73 cm (framed)
Untitled, 2009
Oil on paper, 63 x 73 cm (framed)
In Memory of Painting 3 / Nikolas Gambaroff
by Diana Baldon
In an article appeared this spring in the art magazine Tate Etc., writer Martin Herbert sarcastically affirms: "New modernism is rampant."1 Without any hesitation one can perceive Nikolas Gambaroff's penchant for self-reflexive stances in the era of critical modernism. In fact, encompassing paintings, prints, sculptures and spatial displays, the practice of the German artist demonstrates much theoretical and technical competence. His pictures concern themselves with a strident but savvy mannerism that, sampling through geometric pictorial styles and frequently integrating canvas stretchers as sculptural elements, inquire models that have historically associated painting with the making of pictures, questioning how this medium are manufactured, contemplated, consumed and – to a certain extend – circulated. Whether his works can be labelled "new modernist", to borrow Herbert's expression, neoformalist, as the work of New-York-based painter Wade Guyton has been described, or "conceptual modernist,"all definitions converge to a main fact: modernism was a powerful ideological system of representation whose visual models have yet to be overthrown, despite attempts to famously demystify their hegemony by Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, László Moholy-Nagy's telephone paintings, Daniel Buren's monomaniac stripes, to name some significant examples. This process was inaugurated when Kasimir Malevich applied paint on a canvas to make it – apparently – blank, and, since then, processual operations in panting appear to be rediscovered every decade.2 In the 1940s and 1950s, i.e. the period of transition after high modernism and before the advent of the first fully postmodern generation, absence, literature, literarism, parody, chance and mathematics became key artistic tools within progressively flat and simplified pictorial compositions, employed to rethink all and any previous work in all media. Seminal examples are Ellsworth Kelly's paintings based on numbers found in telephone directories, or François Morellet's use of mathematical images to clarify the process of visual perception. The 1970s instead, when the interest in industrialised systems for making art gained momentum, elevated process over product to undercut the standards on which the art market depended. From that moment on, art compendia and educational curricula in Europe and North America have poured with revisionist painting strategies concerned with painterly forms that, by inheriting the subversive character of abstract modern art's decorativeness, are brought to deeper and more complex grounds. Within such manifold historical scenarios, Gambaroff's production clearly responds to the development of the modernist requirement that the form of a work should acknowledge its implication in the discourse represented, whether this is an epistemological investigation of the image, a shift from content to the contextual conditions of artistic production and reception, or a phenomenological inquiry into the viewer's subjective response. However, it is reductive to think that the internal logics of Gambaroff's pictures go beyond the mere manipulation of familiar signs about painting-as-painting. For the exhibition In Memory of Painting 3, 4 & 5 at Vienna's Layr Wuestenhagen Contemporary, Gambaroff has produced a wall painting and works on paper in which fragments from his previous production combine with narrative parts juxtaposed onto minimal geometric forms. These act as visualisations of notes from a diary written by the artist as a fictional account of the artist's great-grandfather who lived in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. The textual inserts may appear to usurp the space of painting, using writing to reclaim the surface whilst its spatial illusion is eroded and replace with coded – maybe because personal – pictorial content. The mutual implication of verbal and visual emphasises a conceptual boundary, that favoured by art-historical academic establishments that associated the conflict of high modernism and early twentieth-century avant-gardes with the continual struggle between image and text. Yet, the artist's production expands also onto incorporating some functional elements typical of the exhibition context such as the press release and the private view, whose graphics, information and ritual are reorganised to become sort of appendixes or smaller works. At Balice Hertling Gallery last year in Paris, Gambaroff transformed the utilitarianism of the communication contained in the press release into a typographic and literary exercise reminiscent of concrete poetry. Moreover, the exhibition title was, simply, the tracking number of the airway bill accompanying the shipping of his twenty-three paintings from New York to Paris. Interestingly, the works weren't transported with an art handler but with a normal commercial freight company – FedEx –, a decision relating to the compulsive circulation of art trafficked and shown internationally. Similarly to the printer drawings and paintings by Wade Guyton or Walead Beshty's FedEx boxes, Gambaroff's own pictures respond to the fact that the artworld itself has become more like an industry and that artistic production has changed its conditions of production by commenting, indirectly, on the inner contradictions of its heavy commercial production. Such point is further supported by the fact that some of his paintings are monoprints, a printmaking technique that is essentially a single printed image, as no prints can be alike and editioning is not possible. Beyond the paradox of being unique multiples, or quasi-mechanically produced paintings, the nature of these works doesn't mimic or parody industrial production in terms of their status as commodities and, potentially, mass-produced objects but, instead, questions the relationship between artistic and productive labour, further highlighting that artistic production is, inevitably, hostage of the impossibility to be perfectly replicated and distributed. There is an art-historical thesis that sees the development of painting as possibly terminated and, for that reason, artists have felt they must derive the value of their painterly content from more robust resources of theory. Stressing the literalism of painting's reduction to its support, again in Paris Gambaroff invited the New-York-based artist Ei Arakawa to use his canvasses as improvised theatrical props within the conditions of Arakawa's own practice. Although this kind of intervention would seem to date back to the 1960s, and to art historian Michael Fried's argument of the theatricality of art's relationship with the viewer, Gambaroff's choice to appoint his paintings as"specific objects", three-dimensional sculptures, installations or performances is a way to annihilate the supposed redundancy of the visual thrill. And that goes also for his amalgam of separate works along one or several gallery walls that convey maximum decorative variety, a unified but differentiated surface optically moving. By staging the plastic effects of his brushwork, he engages viewers to take on the role of active readers of messages rather than be passive contemplators of aesthetics or consumers of the spectacular.3 In an article appeared last summer in the art magazine Artforum, critic Johanna Burton, while discussing the work of Wade Guyton, writes: "[…] Those who can't quite accept the notion of painting's radical authenticity have long looked for its first principles outside the frame. […] Pointing to the context of painting is inevitably attended by the peril of merely mimicking gestures of the past that are reduced to motif."4 The interplay of erasure and inscription, the quasi-mechanical value of the strokes, the implementation of schemes with declamatory qualities have since long dismantled and confused painterly conventions to invent new codes and models. When asked by art historian Benjamin Buchloh in 1988 how he would describe his work if he refused his analytic pictorial investigations of the rhetoric of painting, the German artist Gerhard Richter replies: "They work emotionally, they derive their effect from natural experiences […] The reason why I don't argue in ‘socio-political terms' is that I want to produce a picture not an ideology. It is always its factuality, and not its ideology, that makes a picture good. Because the whole process does not exist for its own sake; it's only justified when it uses all these beautiful methods and strategies to produce a model. …
[I] regard my abstractions as parables, as images of a possible form of social relations. […] Not paradise."5 Gambaroff's visual layerings and conceptual cross-referencing may not aim to such goal, at least not until now, but they certainly attempt to domesticate our disenchantment with historicized dichotomies such as those of process-product and surface-support by rearranging signs and signals full of encrypted meaning that occur behind the scripted styles and gestures of and around his pictures.
1 Martin Herbert, "Sifting Defunct Modernity in Search of Something Useful" in: Tate Etc., Spring 2009, Issue 15.
2 Critic Johanna Burton writes a propos: "Indeed in the past forty years of critical discourse have taken as foundational the idea that it is perhaps only its commodifiable nature that keeps contemporary painting from relinquishing its relevance. These days, a phrase like ‘the function of painting' has a fifty-fifty chance of being met with an eye roll – one more eerie similarity between this era and the 1980s."(Johanna Burton,"Rites of Silence, on the art ofWade Guyton"in: Artforum International, Summer 2008, pp. 365-372)
3 See: Hal Foster, Recordings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Seattle: 1985, p. 99-100.
4 Johanna Burton, "Rites of Silence, on the art of Wade Guyton" in: Artforum International, Summer 2008, pp. 365-372.
5 See: Interview with Gerhard Richter by Benjamin Buchloh, in: Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exhibition cat. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Art Gallery of Toronto, 1988, pp. 19-29.
by Diana Baldon
In an article appeared this spring in the art magazine Tate Etc., writer Martin Herbert sarcastically affirms: "New modernism is rampant."1 Without any hesitation one can perceive Nikolas Gambaroff's penchant for self-reflexive stances in the era of critical modernism. In fact, encompassing paintings, prints, sculptures and spatial displays, the practice of the German artist demonstrates much theoretical and technical competence. His pictures concern themselves with a strident but savvy mannerism that, sampling through geometric pictorial styles and frequently integrating canvas stretchers as sculptural elements, inquire models that have historically associated painting with the making of pictures, questioning how this medium are manufactured, contemplated, consumed and – to a certain extend – circulated. Whether his works can be labelled "new modernist", to borrow Herbert's expression, neoformalist, as the work of New-York-based painter Wade Guyton has been described, or "conceptual modernist,"all definitions converge to a main fact: modernism was a powerful ideological system of representation whose visual models have yet to be overthrown, despite attempts to famously demystify their hegemony by Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, László Moholy-Nagy's telephone paintings, Daniel Buren's monomaniac stripes, to name some significant examples. This process was inaugurated when Kasimir Malevich applied paint on a canvas to make it – apparently – blank, and, since then, processual operations in panting appear to be rediscovered every decade.2 In the 1940s and 1950s, i.e. the period of transition after high modernism and before the advent of the first fully postmodern generation, absence, literature, literarism, parody, chance and mathematics became key artistic tools within progressively flat and simplified pictorial compositions, employed to rethink all and any previous work in all media. Seminal examples are Ellsworth Kelly's paintings based on numbers found in telephone directories, or François Morellet's use of mathematical images to clarify the process of visual perception. The 1970s instead, when the interest in industrialised systems for making art gained momentum, elevated process over product to undercut the standards on which the art market depended. From that moment on, art compendia and educational curricula in Europe and North America have poured with revisionist painting strategies concerned with painterly forms that, by inheriting the subversive character of abstract modern art's decorativeness, are brought to deeper and more complex grounds. Within such manifold historical scenarios, Gambaroff's production clearly responds to the development of the modernist requirement that the form of a work should acknowledge its implication in the discourse represented, whether this is an epistemological investigation of the image, a shift from content to the contextual conditions of artistic production and reception, or a phenomenological inquiry into the viewer's subjective response. However, it is reductive to think that the internal logics of Gambaroff's pictures go beyond the mere manipulation of familiar signs about painting-as-painting. For the exhibition In Memory of Painting 3, 4 & 5 at Vienna's Layr Wuestenhagen Contemporary, Gambaroff has produced a wall painting and works on paper in which fragments from his previous production combine with narrative parts juxtaposed onto minimal geometric forms. These act as visualisations of notes from a diary written by the artist as a fictional account of the artist's great-grandfather who lived in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. The textual inserts may appear to usurp the space of painting, using writing to reclaim the surface whilst its spatial illusion is eroded and replace with coded – maybe because personal – pictorial content. The mutual implication of verbal and visual emphasises a conceptual boundary, that favoured by art-historical academic establishments that associated the conflict of high modernism and early twentieth-century avant-gardes with the continual struggle between image and text. Yet, the artist's production expands also onto incorporating some functional elements typical of the exhibition context such as the press release and the private view, whose graphics, information and ritual are reorganised to become sort of appendixes or smaller works. At Balice Hertling Gallery last year in Paris, Gambaroff transformed the utilitarianism of the communication contained in the press release into a typographic and literary exercise reminiscent of concrete poetry. Moreover, the exhibition title was, simply, the tracking number of the airway bill accompanying the shipping of his twenty-three paintings from New York to Paris. Interestingly, the works weren't transported with an art handler but with a normal commercial freight company – FedEx –, a decision relating to the compulsive circulation of art trafficked and shown internationally. Similarly to the printer drawings and paintings by Wade Guyton or Walead Beshty's FedEx boxes, Gambaroff's own pictures respond to the fact that the artworld itself has become more like an industry and that artistic production has changed its conditions of production by commenting, indirectly, on the inner contradictions of its heavy commercial production. Such point is further supported by the fact that some of his paintings are monoprints, a printmaking technique that is essentially a single printed image, as no prints can be alike and editioning is not possible. Beyond the paradox of being unique multiples, or quasi-mechanically produced paintings, the nature of these works doesn't mimic or parody industrial production in terms of their status as commodities and, potentially, mass-produced objects but, instead, questions the relationship between artistic and productive labour, further highlighting that artistic production is, inevitably, hostage of the impossibility to be perfectly replicated and distributed. There is an art-historical thesis that sees the development of painting as possibly terminated and, for that reason, artists have felt they must derive the value of their painterly content from more robust resources of theory. Stressing the literalism of painting's reduction to its support, again in Paris Gambaroff invited the New-York-based artist Ei Arakawa to use his canvasses as improvised theatrical props within the conditions of Arakawa's own practice. Although this kind of intervention would seem to date back to the 1960s, and to art historian Michael Fried's argument of the theatricality of art's relationship with the viewer, Gambaroff's choice to appoint his paintings as"specific objects", three-dimensional sculptures, installations or performances is a way to annihilate the supposed redundancy of the visual thrill. And that goes also for his amalgam of separate works along one or several gallery walls that convey maximum decorative variety, a unified but differentiated surface optically moving. By staging the plastic effects of his brushwork, he engages viewers to take on the role of active readers of messages rather than be passive contemplators of aesthetics or consumers of the spectacular.3 In an article appeared last summer in the art magazine Artforum, critic Johanna Burton, while discussing the work of Wade Guyton, writes: "[…] Those who can't quite accept the notion of painting's radical authenticity have long looked for its first principles outside the frame. […] Pointing to the context of painting is inevitably attended by the peril of merely mimicking gestures of the past that are reduced to motif."4 The interplay of erasure and inscription, the quasi-mechanical value of the strokes, the implementation of schemes with declamatory qualities have since long dismantled and confused painterly conventions to invent new codes and models. When asked by art historian Benjamin Buchloh in 1988 how he would describe his work if he refused his analytic pictorial investigations of the rhetoric of painting, the German artist Gerhard Richter replies: "They work emotionally, they derive their effect from natural experiences […] The reason why I don't argue in ‘socio-political terms' is that I want to produce a picture not an ideology. It is always its factuality, and not its ideology, that makes a picture good. Because the whole process does not exist for its own sake; it's only justified when it uses all these beautiful methods and strategies to produce a model. …
[I] regard my abstractions as parables, as images of a possible form of social relations. […] Not paradise."5 Gambaroff's visual layerings and conceptual cross-referencing may not aim to such goal, at least not until now, but they certainly attempt to domesticate our disenchantment with historicized dichotomies such as those of process-product and surface-support by rearranging signs and signals full of encrypted meaning that occur behind the scripted styles and gestures of and around his pictures.
1 Martin Herbert, "Sifting Defunct Modernity in Search of Something Useful" in: Tate Etc., Spring 2009, Issue 15.
2 Critic Johanna Burton writes a propos: "Indeed in the past forty years of critical discourse have taken as foundational the idea that it is perhaps only its commodifiable nature that keeps contemporary painting from relinquishing its relevance. These days, a phrase like ‘the function of painting' has a fifty-fifty chance of being met with an eye roll – one more eerie similarity between this era and the 1980s."(Johanna Burton,"Rites of Silence, on the art ofWade Guyton"in: Artforum International, Summer 2008, pp. 365-372)
3 See: Hal Foster, Recordings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Seattle: 1985, p. 99-100.
4 Johanna Burton, "Rites of Silence, on the art of Wade Guyton" in: Artforum International, Summer 2008, pp. 365-372.
5 See: Interview with Gerhard Richter by Benjamin Buchloh, in: Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exhibition cat. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Art Gallery of Toronto, 1988, pp. 19-29.