Claudia Fährenkemper
Kontextforschung / context research 1980–2022

The Artist’s First Publication in more than Thirty Years

For more than forty years Stephen Buckley (b. 1944, Leicester) has concerned himself with addressing the major themes of the twentieth century through a personal style oscillating between the matière of Kurt Schwitters, the dandyism of Francis Picabia and the intellectual rigour of Marcel Duchamp. He takes the two most basic components of a conventional painting (canvas and stretcher), and makes multi-dimensional constructions, joins groups of single canvases together in overlapping structures, makes shaped canvases, cuts a stretcher with a variegated edge, stitches and weaves together strips of canvas, patches pieces of canvas onto another support, and adds cardboard tubing, rope, found objects and cut out shapes. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Buckley saw extended prominence in the art press, starting with the artist being described as “the Punk Rock of contemporary painting” and ending with him gaining the title of “the ubiquitous Stephen Buckley”. There is now a large portfolio of themes, references, motifs and symbols which are continually reworked and reinvented. Since then, he has made some of his most compelling paintings, lush pop canvases full of symbols and colour, a far cry from the pared-down, industrial feel of some of his early works.

The Early Years of the Weimar Print Workshop

At the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, the print workshop began operation in the spring of 1919 as the first workshop. Printmaking corresponded to the basic idea of the Bauhaus in that it realized the unity of art and craftsmanship in an ideal manner. With the groundbreaking project Bauhaus-Drucke. Neue Europaeische Graphik, four portfolios were created in which forty-five representatives of the European artistic avant-garde participated. In the announcement brochure of 1921, it stated: “The many who do not yet know about the work of the Bauhaus, and who cannot know, are to be made aware of us through this work.” The book presents the portfolios published between 1921 and 1924, together with other works printed at the Bauhaus by Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer. The Stuttgarter Prolog also sheds light on the influence of Adolf Hölzel, whose students and later Bauhaus masters Oskar Schlemmer and Johannes Itten brought many of his ideas to the Bauhaus.

An Expressive Instant in Painting

The art of Matthew Davis (b. 1969, Colchester, UK; lives and works in Berlin) operates between the micro and macro dimensions, between control and chance. Working with extraordinary precision, the artist applies drops of synthetic resin varnishes and enamel paints to canvases laid flat. The artist’s book Kustodiev showcases a recent innovative turn in Davis’s output, whose latest works were inspired by the lusciously colorful pictures of the Russian painter Boris Kustodiev (1878–1927). Kustodiev was manufactured using offset presses and Office Offset, a largely forgotten reproduction process based on miniature offset printing machines. The publication is released in a limited edition of 250 copies.

Matthew Davis studied at the Camberwell College of Arts, London, and the Norwich School of Art and Design. His work has been shown at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin; Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven; and other museums and galleries.

A Painter, Draftsman, and Draftsman of Concrete Art

Paul Uwe Dreyer (b. 1939, Osnabrück; d. 2008, Stuttgart) taught painting as a professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart for more than three decades. His oeuvre shows the hallmarks of geometric constructive art: inspired by subjective experiences of reality, Dreyer’s compositions visualize the dialectics of organizing principles and their potentials for variation, a guiding interest that is already evident in his early work since the 1960s and especially in the pairs and series of pictures he begins creating in the early 1970s. His art unfolds a fascinatingly dynamic yet nonhierarchical dialogue between colors, surfaces, and lines. The chronological catalogue raisonné reveals the consistency with which motifs evolve from his early to his late oeuvre, from architectural, figural, and ornamental tokens through elements resembling symbols and icons to complex penetrations of spaces.