Anna Leonhardt
Touching Space

The Protagonist of the Modern Woodcut

The German painter, draftsman, and graphic artist Martin Noël (b. Berlin, 1956; d. Bonn, 2010) played a leading role in reviving the linocut and the woodcut, two techniques that had long been eclipsed by other media. In his large-format works on paper, he staked out a widely regarded and distinctive position in contemporary art. Noël was especially interested in the compositional relationship between line and surface. Released on occasion of the retrospective of his oeuvre at the Albertina, Vienna, this book presents an overview of the most important periods in the artist’s creative evolution, with an emphasis on the woodcut carved into the printing plate and the woodblock’s subsequent emancipation as an art object in its own right. Particular attention is paid to the application of ink to the surface and its painterly structure as well as the picture’s migration from object to canvas. The resulting paintings are exemplary of Noël’s late oeuvre.

Martin Noël studied graphic art and painting at what is now the Cologne University of Arts and Sciences. His art garnered numerous prizes and other honors, including fellowships from Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and Letter Stiftung. Works by Noël are in the German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, and the collection of Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.

Awkward Uncertainty

Michael Williams (b. 1978, Doylestown, Pa.; lives and works in Los Angeles) makes work that interrogates the history of painting, often by dismantling its components into their constituent parts. His pictures employ form to reflect on the complexity and contradictions of modern life. He works on canvas, availing himself of a range of techniques including oil painting, collage, and inkjet prints. In his new works, Williams examines the relationship between painting and photography, transferring the chilly aloofness that is characteristic of the latter onto the former. The photographic “negative” yields a smooth canvas disencumbered of its painterly qualities and the medium’s historic ballast. The book includes several foldout plates that illustrate Williams’s creative approach, and a brief essay by his Austrian fellow painter Tobias Pils.

Michael Williams studied fine arts at Washington University, St. Louis, and has exhibited widely, including at the Wiener Secession, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Ein Spiel mit den Ambivalenzen

Offenkundig Mythologisches gerät bei Gerhard Neumaier (geb. 1950 in Freiburg, lebt und arbeitet in Baden-Baden) ebenso zur trivialen Episode, wie scheinbar Triviales legendäre Ikonik entfaltet. Dabei bricht sein unvoreingenommener Umgang mit Klassikern wie etwa in der Duchamp-Persiflage „Hokuspokus mit Fokus Lokus“ semantische Vorurteile in den Sehgewohnheiten auf und bietet dem Betrachter neuartige Interpretationen. In der perfomativen Bewegtheit seiner Rakelbilder legt er eine haptische Sinnlichkeit an den Tag, die Cora von Pape in ihrer Einleitung dazu bringt, den Künstler zu zitieren: „Ich male, was ich weiß, damit ich sehe, was ich fühle.“