Tobias Pils
Drawings

Michael Williams (b. Doylestown, Pa., U.S., 1978; lives and works in Los Angeles, Ca.) is known for paintings whose source materials have been subjected to both analog and digital processes in an effort to render the fragmented nature of our existence today. During the lockdown, he created six large-format collage paintings. To make these modern history paintings, he mounted paper printouts on canvases and reworked the pictures with paint. They are, in short, classic collages, as in the exhilarating days of DADA, when the photographic image from newspapers first transmigrated into art. 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.

Sevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.

An Artist Book Setting New Visual Processes in Motion

Around the year 2009, Horst Keining (b. 1949, Hattingen; lives and works in Düsseldorf) began to create blurred contours with the help of a small spray gun used without stencil. Up to four partially superimposed pictorial planes result in the oscillation and almost three-dimensional pulsation of the pictorial space. In interplay with a contrasting juxtaposition of strongly contoured images, his works convey a completely new visual experience. Since the resulting “blur effect” shrinks due to the reduction, this artist book places an essential accent on the reproduction of image details in their original size, followed by a full image of the picture.

Lebensraum of our Time: Contemporary Landscape Painting

The central theme of Heike Negenborn (b. 1964, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler; lives and works in Windesheim) is the seen lebensraum. In reference to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, her works stand in a specific tradition of capturing reality. With her new group of works titled Net-Scape – Landscape in Transition, Negenborn transfers art historical references into contemporary images. The artist is interested in the possibilities of media transfer and the increasing appropriation of analog reality by the digital image. The present volume provides impressive insights into the developments of the landscape painter from 2007 to 2020.

Heike Negenborn studied fine arts at Austin College, Texas, Art Education at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, and Painting and Printmaking at the Akademie für Bildende Künste Mainz.