Bottrop, Breunig, Schröder
20:15

A Tribute to the 100th Birthday. One of the Important Figurative Positions of the Young Federal Republic of Germany

She was an unusual painter who sought to hide her gender behind a pseudonym, while at the same time addressing her own circumstances as an independent artist and single mother in her large-format canvases. Gudrun Irene Widmann (b. 1919, Reutlingen; d. 2011, Reutlingen) created an oeuvre that lays claim to being one of the most important figurative positions of the 1950s and ’60s. This retrospective volume pays testimony to a strong personality and sheds light not only on her self-image as an artist but also on the influences of society and personal contexts — representative of the situation of female artists in general.

Gudrun Irene Widmann studied at the academies in Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, and Vienna during the Second World War. She worked in her own studio in her hometown of Reutlingen until her death.

Sabrina Fritsch’s (b. Neunkirchen/Saar, 1979; lives and works in Cologne) paintings explore the potentials of the compositional process and the mechanisms of perception. Many of them feature coarse structures, textile surfaces, and delicate superimpositions. In this publication, Fritsch, who was recently appointed professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, presents a résumé of the painterly oeuvre she has developed since her graduation from the same school in 2008. It encompasses two related books, each of which undertakes a structured study of a major strand in Fritsch’s art. One offers a chronological survey of a representative selection of works created between 2008 and 2019 that illustrate her playful and experimental engagement with the constituents of the painted picture: the picture-as-object, the organization of pictorial space, and the phenomenology of physical color. In addition to works on canvas boasting a wide variety of applications of materials and paint, it also covers serial variations in prints. The other showcases three exhibitions and bodies of work dating from 2020 and 2021 that are dedicated to the three color systems RGB, black-and-white (BAW), and CMYK.

Contemplating Nature in a Reduced-Mobility Environment

“The events of the year 2021, which was defined by lockdowns, the pandemic, and restrictions, has brought out the resonance in my pictures of Gustave Courbet’s realism,” Alexander Ruthner (b. Vienna, 1982; lives and works in Vienna) says about his most recent works: oil paintings featuring lush green vegetation and veritable down comforters painted all-over in saturated color gradients. The works will make their public début as the publication is released in the summer of 2021, hence the word “Sommer” in the title. The other word, “Cour,” is a nod to the first syllable of the French painter’s name as well as French for “court,” a term the artist creatively reinterprets as a synonym for the solitary “castle of the mind” to which we have retreated under pandemic conditions. Ruthner, who studied with Peter Kogler, Daniel Richter, and Albert Oehlen, revisits the boscage and pasture painting of past eras in new works that propose a distinctive personal interpretation of that tradition’s charm.

Alexander Ruthner’s work has been shown at Kunsthalle Wien, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the National Museum of Montenegro, among other venues.

The multimedia artist Olaf Breuning (b. Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1970; lives and works in Upstate New York) has built a multifaceted oeuvre in installation art, photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and performance that questions contemporary reality. In a recent series of paintings, he playfully grapples with pressing concerns such as global warming. Like his earlier work, the new ensemble manifests his unorthodox approach. Breuning devised a unique painterly technique involving large-format wooden stamps with which he presses paint onto the canvas. The result is unconventional and fresh.

The publication—the first book dedicated exclusively to Breuning’s paintings—presents two dozen pictures as well documentation of the production process in the form of wooden stamps and sculptures. A dialogue between Katharina Beisiegel, director of the Kirchner Museum, Davos, and Gianni Jetzer, designated director of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, delves into parallels and differences between the oeuvres of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Olaf Breuning.

Breuning trained as a photographer in Winterthur from 1988 until 1993 and completed a master class in photography from 1992 until 1995. In 1995–1996, he was enrolled in a postgraduate program at today’s Zurich University of the Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at the NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Chisenhale Gallery, London; and the Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne. He participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has had work in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunsthalle Zürich; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Jeu de Paume, Paris; the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

The events captured in Filip Henin’s (b. Mayen, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are set in a world beyond time and place, as though on an empty stage prepared for a Samuel Beckett production. It is virtually impossible to say whether a picture shows a coastal region or a craggy slope up in the mountains, whether a field of blue represents the sea or a band of open sky. Henin strips landscapes down no less than human figures, subtracting specific features to isolate basic forms that might be found in the hill country around his hometown in western Germany or in Tuscany. His work integrates quotations from antiquity, Romantic landscape painting, and postmodernism as well as Italian Transavanguardia, the mysticism of Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, and the figurative painting of the 1990s. Without veering into drama or pathos, he harnesses two utterly antithetical energies: the reflection on painting and the history of art and the need to be simple.