Art Basel 2013 - "Importance of being abstract" / "Energizing the Abstract" an imagenistical approach by Paul Rolans

The Art Newspaper

“Importance of being abstract”

Abstract art dominates the fair as collectors seek less flashy works and artists begin to update the form

By Charlotte Burns, Melanie Gerlis and Julia Michalska. From Art Basel daily edition
Published online: 12 June 2013

Abstract art, the form that dominated the 20th century, once again reigns supreme at the 44th edition of Art Basel. As the fair opened yesterday to the great, the rich and the famous—including the man of the month, Massimiliano Gioni, the director of the Venice Biennale, Russia’s power couple Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova, and the actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Lukas Haas—visitors were confronted with a variety of non-representative, non-figurative art.

Historical pieces by abstract pioneers include kinetic sculptures by Alexander Calder (such as Blue Flower, Red Flower, 1975, at Tina Kim/Kukje, 2.0/F6, priced at $2.8m), Minimalist wall pieces by Donald Judd (including Untitled (Ballantine 89-49), 1989, priced at $2.4m with David Zwirner, 2.0/F5) and various large abstract works by Richter (a 1984 example is on show at Richard Gray Gallery, 2.0/E4, priced at $6.5m; a piece from 1992 is on offer with Dominique Lévy Gallery, 2.0/F4, for “under $20m”). In equal abundance are works by contemporary artists who have taken on the abstract mantle, including Christopher Wool (Untitled, 2001, at Luhring Augustine, 2.0/E13, $1.5m) and Albert Oehlen (FM44, 2011, which sold to a European collector for €250,000 within hours of the fair’s opening at Galerie Max Hetzler, 2.0/E7).

“The abstract abounds,” says Lisa Spellman, the founder of New York’s 303 Gallery (2.1/J21). She is showing non-figurative works priced between $150,000 and $250,000, including two large 2013 works by the gallery’s recently recruited artist Jacob Kassay, which were bought together by a European private collector, and six ceramic works by Nick Mauss, which sold for $23,000 each. Sean Kelly (2.1/N2) designed his stand according to “different ideas of abstraction”, centred around Joseph Kosuth’s Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), 1967, priced at €100,000. “There’s a lot of really good [abstract] work being done across all media right now—painting, photography, conceptual—and we wanted to reflect that,” he says. New works on show include Callum Innes’s Untitled, 2013, a large oil and shellac canvas, which sold to a private US collector for £50,000.

The artist Ad Reinhardt famously said that his 1960s “black” abstract works marked the end of painting, but the abstract form “remains wide open to fresh contributions”, says Robert Storr, the dean of the Yale University School of Art, who is organising a Reinhardt exhibition for David Zwirner in New York this November. It is “one of the great inventions of Modern art that is barely a century old”—rather, it is “a century young”, he says. 

Can today’s artist move the once-radical form in a new, meaningful direction? “The problem is, there is a group of lower-tier abstract painters who are good and whose work looks beautiful, but what they are bringing to the table in terms of art history is nothing new. They are not adding to the conversation,” says the New York-based art adviser Lisa Schiff.

She highlights exceptions whom she thinks are “making enough of a formal innovation to stand alone”. These include the US artist Garth Weiser, whose Sedaka, 2013, sold for $55,000 to a private US collector within half an hour of the fair’s opening at Casey Kaplan (2.1/N16). Massimo De Carlo (2.1/N3) has hung three equal-sized abstract works by different artists next to each other, to “explore the possibilities of abstract art”, says Flavio del Monte, the gallery’s institutional relations manager. “We are bombarded by images everywhere today, so it is important for artists to take some distance,” he says. Loring Randolph, a director at Casey Kaplan, says: “The abstract is always relevant; you can have a rhetoric behind it that can be whatever you want.” Today’s practitioners, she says, “think about how the concept [of the abstract] and the process can work together”.

Process is key: artists are experimenting with materials and technology that were previously unavailable, to update the form. Denise René’s stand (2.0/D19) includes works by the Brussels-based artist group LAb[au]. The pieces, such as Particle Springs, 2011, priced at €27,000, use computer algorithms to create moving, smoke-like patterns on monitors. Mitchell-Innes & Nash (2.0/E6) is showing avant-garde masters such as Franz Kline (Provincetown II, 1959, around $10m) alongside younger artists including Keltie Ferris (Laissez-Faire, 2013, $50,000), whose work is inspired by graffiti and digitalisation.

For some, abstract art provides the chance to explore art history in a new way. At Galerie Nordenhake (2.1/P9), the 29-year-old artist Paul Fägerskiöld has used spray paint to create a homage to both Jackson Pollock and the Pointillists in his monochrome Untitled (Yellow), 2013, €25,000, which sold to a private German museum. At Sperone Westwater (2.0/E10), Emil Lukas’s thread-painting diptych panels Curtain East and Curtain West, 2013, which sold for $65,000, are influenced by Sol LeWitt. 

The trend is market-led, too. The boom years were characterised by flashy, self-explanatory art, but there has been a return to more thoughtful, abstract forms such as those produced by artists within the European Zero group. “We staged an exhibition of their work in 2008, which raised consciousness for an American audience to whom the work seemed new. The response was strong and has increased,” says Angela Westwater, the co-director of Sperone Westwater. The gallery is showing works by artists associated with the group, including Lucio Fontana’sConcetto spaziale, 1958, priced at around €1m, and Otto Piene’s 1975 oil and fire on canvas, Red Matters, priced at €250,000. Meanwhile, post-recession records have been achieved at auction for works by abstract artists, including the $43.8m paid for Barnett Newman’s Onement VI, 1953, at Sotheby’s in New York last month. “Collectors now want quieter, intellectual art with more depth. The years of the loud, funny works are over,” says Bob van Orsouw (2.1/P17), who is showing works including a wall sculpture by the Dutch conceptual artist Ger van Elk (Los Angeles Freeway Flyer, 1973, €125,000). 

The fact that much abstract art is easy on the eye (and looks good above the sofa) could be one of the attractions for some of the new buyers who have entered the market since 2008, according to some in the trade. “It doesn’t seem so long ago that figurative art was the latest fashion; now it’s good-looking abstract,” one London dealer says. Others do not see the problem. “Who says that decorative art is not also serious art? Matisse and virtually all of Islamic tradition attest to the fact that it is or can be,” Robert Storr says, adding: “Is Mondrian eye-candy?”

Signac, les couleurs de l´eau / Paul Rolans, des Images dans l´eau

„Dans le cadre de la seconde édition du festival Normandie Impressionniste consacrée au thème de l’eau, le musée des impressionnismes Giverny organise une exposition « Signac, les couleurs de l’eau ».

Comme Claude Monet, Paul Signac a trouvé une source d’inspiration constante dans l’évocation de l’eau et de ses couleurs.
Depuis les premières marines peintes sur le littoral normand avec une vigueur et une liberté impressionnistes jusqu’aux amples architectures portuaires aux couleurs vives d’après-guerre, la description de l’eau et du ciel offrirent à Signac un inépuisable prétexte à multiplier les variations chromatiques.”….continuez ici (site: Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny)

J´admire les oeuvres des impressionnistes beaucoup. Depuis dix ans,je travaille á mon projet “des Images dans l´eau“. Je le regarde comme une continuation de leur travail, avec des moyens d´aujourd´hui.

"Bountiful Harvest from the Color Fields - Keen Colorations à la Kenneth" by Paul Rolans

Color Field painting consciously distanced itself from societal referents and focused on the lyrical possibilities of color. For the first time since Impressionism, pure opticality held primacy over content and form. 

Michael McNay from The Guardian wrote:

Kenneth Noland, was one of the young artists tasked with seizing the star-spangled standard from the preceding warrior generation of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and bearing it aloft into battle. Even more than this, Noland enjoyed having Americans claiming him as the successor to the mantle of Matisse, but in truth he had more in common with the Bauhaus abstractionist Josef Albers, who moved to the US and taught Noland at Black Mountain college, North Carolina. Noland disliked what he regarded as Albers's doctrinaire approach, but his own practice of geometric abstraction remained indelibly marked by the old German's influence.

Noland became celebrated in the 1950s for his series of concentric circles in a dazzling array of colours; not, like the paintings of Jasper Johns, targets, but circles as a simple geometric form that could demonstrate an infinite number of colour combinations. Next came circles with blurred edges, like blazing catherine wheels, diamond shapes, diamonds within circles, chevrons and stripes. The message was colour, usually pure and always simple.
Read more

Did you see the exhibition:

Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today, Tate Liverpool

BY CHARLES DARWENT

 SUNDAY 31 MAY 2009

The Independent

“Since there has been art, there have been disagreements about colour – what it means, how to use it, whether it is a good or bad thing.

Vasari held that colore was Venetian, while disegno – roughly, drawing – was Florentine and thus (Vasari was from Florence) better. The row rumbled on for 400 years: drawing was rational, clever, Poussin; colour was sensuous, sensual, Rubens. And so things stood until the 20th century, when two changes took place, the subject of a show called Colour Chart at Tate Liverpool.

The first change was that the number and kind of colours available to artists mushroomed with developments in paint-making. This wasn't just about stuff sold in art shops: for the first time, artists took to buying colours from their local B&Q.

An early apostle of household paint was Picasso, who waxed particularly lyrical about a commercial enamel called Ripolin. The first burst of colour on the dowdy palette of Analytic Cubism came courtesy of Ripolin, in Picasso's Violin, Glass, Pipe and Anchor of 1912.

Largely, though, the hues and tints of hardware paints were still used as a means to an end – to convey mood or rhythm, or to reproduce the warmth of sun on brick. It was only after the Second World War that the idea of color gratia coloris – colour for colour's sake – took off, marking a second phase in the 20th century's chromatic revolution.

Various things brought this about. The first was a rebellion against the valuing of skill which had held sway since Phidias. As far back as 1921, Aleksandr Rodchenko's Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour, shown at Tate Modern earlier this year, had hinted that the hand no longer counted in painting – that a canvas covered in a single pigment was as valid a work as the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Still, Rodchenko had made his statement in artist's oils. Now, nonart paints – the kind of stuff anyone might buy and use for anything – brought the point home.

Modernity wasn't going to dwell in an ivory tower, or at least in academies and art museums. It was going to be made in ex-light industrial lofts and factories, and its making would be open to anyone with a tin of paint and a roller. (Or, in the case of Dan Flavin and Donald Judd fluorescent tubes and a steel cutter.)

Commercial paints, familiar to anyone who had ever decorated a spare room or sprayed a bent fender, were a visible sign of what Colour Chart's curator, Ann Temkin, calls the "de-skilling" of art. It was all very democratic, although, as often with democracy, not completely so.

Actually, there were three requirements to being a modern artist: a tin of paint, a roller and an idea. Bound up in the dissing of the hand in art was a new fetishising of the mind – a way of working that Sol LeWitt dubbed "conceptual". LeWitt's Wall Drawing #918, a room-sized work, announces its intentions in eye-frying, shop-bought colours, in the fact that it has a number rather than a name – it, too, might have been ordered from a shop – and that it wasn't made by LeWitt but by his assistants.

In the demotic phrase of the builder's yard, Wall Drawing #918was contracted out, and looks it. Changing attitudes towards colour in the 20th century aresummed up by a sequence of three German artists.

In the Bauhaus of the1930s, Josef Albers painted squares of Masonite, the chipboard of its day, insub-squares of overlapping colours. The beauty Albers sought was of systematisation, a literally chromatic scale to match a musical one. Forty years later, Gerhard Richter up-ended Albers' thinking by painting pictures that didn't just look like colour charts but actually were.

Works such as 1025 Colours are precisely what they claim to be: deadpan recreations of Pantone sheets, a self-referring self-advertisement. Twenty years on from Richter, Katharina Fritsch's Eight Paintings in Eight Colours (1991)shows the impossible position Richter had left her in. If you're a chromatic painter, where do you go from 1025Colours?

Fritsch's answer, a snapshot of art in the 1990s, is to turn the question into a game by putting single hues in big, academy frames”

ColourChart is that engaging thing, a show that takes something familiar and, by focussing on it, makes you see it afresh. By all means go.TateLiverpool (0151-702 7400) to 13 Sep

Mark Rothko: "Silence is so accurate" a tribute by Paul Rolans

Here is another video of my work regarding color,form and space. This time I  pay tribute to the great Mark Rothko.
I have collected some information about what he and others said and wrote about his art,especially that of his late period..

In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about similarities in the art of children and the work of modern painters." In this manuscript, he observed that "the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color." Read more.

Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes, and his subject matter and form at this time had become non-intellectual.

Fearing that modern American painting had reached a conceptual dead end, Rothko was intent upon exploring subjects other than urban and natural scenes. He sought subjects that would complement his growing concern with form, space, and color.

Rothko, in the middle of a crucial period of transition, had been impressed by Clyfford Still's abstract fields of color, which were influenced in part by the landscapes of Still's native North Dakota ,He described his new method as "unknown adventures in an unknown space", free from "direct association with any particular, and the passion of organism".

It was at some point during the winter of 1948 that Rothko happened upon the use of symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary, colors, in which, for example, "the rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce out of the ground, concentrations of its substance. Additionally, for the next seven years, Rothko painted in oil only on large canvases with vertical formats. Very large-scale designs were used in order to overwhelm the viewer, or, in Rothko's words, to make the viewer feel "enveloped within" the painting

In 1949, Rothko became fascinated by Matisse's Red Studio, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art that year. He later credited it as a key source of inspiration for his later abstract paintings.

In these paintings, color and structure are inseparable: the forms themselves consist of color alone, and their translucency establishes a layered depth that complements and vastly enriches the vertical architecture of the composition. Variations in saturation and tone as well as hue evoke an elusive yet almost palpable realm of shallow space. Color, structure, and space combine to create a unique presence. In this respect, Rothko stated that the large scale of these canvases was intended to contain or envelop the viewer--not to be "grandiose," but "intimate and human." Read more.

Rothko's art reveals a distinct and personal interpretation of the abstract expressionist style. From his first emergence as a mature artist, he eschewed the gestural brushwork and the dense, painterly surfaces that became celebrated in the work of De Kooning, Franz Kline, and others. Instead, Rothko concentrated on expression through color alone, and to this end he radically simplified his imagery. In his best paintings, the imagery consists of two or three rectangles of color that float within an abstract space. Generally, the areas of color dissolve softly into one another, denying all traces of either hard or tactile edges. The softness is a function of the artist's delicate, feathery brushstrokes, and it results in an expanding pictorial space that seems to consist of pure color rather than colored objects. In many of Rothko's paintings his colors appear to generate their own magical or divine light. Read more.

Sensing the futility of words in describing this decidedly non-verbal aspect of his work, Rothko abandoned all attempts at responding to those that might inquire after its meaning and purpose, stating finally that silence is "so accurate". His paintings' "surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles you can find everything I want to say."

For Rothko, color is "merely an instrument". The "multiforms" and the signature paintings are, in essence, the same expression of "basic human emotions", as his surrealistic mythological paintings, albeit in a more pure form. 

" Who Squares ? " an imagenistic homage to Kazimir Malevich and Josef Albers by Paul Rolans

"In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism. In 1915--1916 he worked with other Suprematist artists in a peasant/artisan co-operative in Skoptsi and Verbovka village. In 1916--1917 he participated in exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds group in Moscow together with Nathan Altman, David Burliuk and A. Ekster, The most amous examples of his Suprematist work is the Black Square .The first Black Square was painted in 1915 and became the turning point in the development of Russian avant-garde. (From Wikipedia)
Malevich: "When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, "Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!"
"But this desert is filled with the spirit of nonobjective sensation which pervades everything."

Homage to the Square by Josef Albers

"Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with nested squares. The optical effects Albers created—shimmering color contrasts and the illusion of receding and advancing planes—were meant not so much to deceive the eye as to challenge the viewer's faculties of visual reception. This shift in emphasis from perception willed by the artist to reception engineered by the viewer is the philosophical root of the Homage to the Square series. Albers tried to teach the mechanics of vision and show even the uninformed viewer how to see." (Cornelia Lauf and Wikipedia)

"Vivid Colors, the intergalactic troubadour, celebrates the discovery of HD 40307g with an illustrious Colorado"

Herald Sun 10 november 2012
"A NEWLY discovered alien planet seven times bigger than Earth may be able to support life, astronomers wrote in a study.
The planet, dubbed HD 40307g, is one of only a few to be discovered in the "habitable zone": a sweet spot, neither too close or too far from its sun, where liquid water could exist,  the team of international astronomers, led by Mikko Tuomi, University of Hertfordshire, England, and Guillem Anglada-Escude, University of Goettingen, Germany, wrote in the journal, Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The so-called "super-Earth" orbits its star - HD 40307, a dwarf just slightly smaller, cooler and less bright than our sun - every 200 days.
It is relatively close to the solar-system neighbourhood, just 42 light years away. A light year is equivalent to about 9460 billion kilometres.
"The star HD 40307 is a perfectly quiet old dwarf star, so there is no reason why such a planet could not sustain an Earth-like climate,'' said astronomer Guillem Anglada-Escude of the University of Goettingen in Germany.
The next step is to use powerful telescopes to study the planet more closely.
A large number of observations will be necessary to confirm any other similarities with Earth, the astronomers said.
The study noted that the distance between the planet and its star is similar to that between the Earth and the sun and that it is likely the planet rotates on its axis, which would create a day and night cycle like ours.
So far, some 846 planets have been found outside our solar system since 1995, using high-powered equipment, most notably the Kepler telescope, launched in March 2009 to search for Earth-like planets.
Most of the discoveries are of planets far larger than Earth."

The Daily Telegraph2012-11-08: A ''super-Earth'' that could have a life-supporting climate has been discovered in a multi-world solar system 42 light years from the Sun. Photo: Nasa 1:04PM GMT 08 Nov 2012 A ''super-Earth'' that could have a life-supporting climate has been discovered in a multi-world solar system 42 light years from the Sun. The planet, which is several times more massive than the Earth, lies just the right distance from its star to allow the existence of liquid surface water. It orbits well within the star's ''habitable'' or ''Goldilocks'' zone - the region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold to sustain life.... more »

Astronomers Discover Potentially Habitable 'Super Earth' 42 Light Years Away2012-11-08

US News Planet could be close enough to observe with conventional telescopes Scientists say they've detected a planet that could have life just 42 light-years from earth—close enough so that astronomers might someday be able to directly observe it through a telescope. [READ: NASA Observes Record-Setting Gas Storm on Saturn] The "super Earth" is about seven times...            

New super-Earth that may be just right to support life found in six-planet system2012-11-08

Newstrack India Tweet Washington, November 8 (ANI): A new super-Earth planet that may have an Earth-like climate and be just right to support life has been discovered around a nearby star. An international team of astronomers led by Mikko Tuomi, University of Hertfordshire, and Guillem Anglada-Escude, University of Goettingen made the discovery. The new super-Earth planet exists in the...

Astronomers find tantalizing hints of a potentially habitable exoplanet2012-11-08

PhysOrg HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) on ESO's La Silla 3.6m telescope is a dedicated exoplanet hunter, able to detect the oh-so-slight wobble of a star caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. Led by Mikko Tuomi of the UK's University of Hertfordshire Centre for Astrophysics Research, a team of researchers reviewed publicly-available data from HARPS...            

Super-Earth in six-planet system just right to support life2012-11-08

The Hindu Astronomers have discovered a new super-Earth planet around a nearby star that may have an Earth-like climate and be just right to support life. The new planet exists in the habitable zone of a nearby star and is part of a six-planet system. The system was previously thought to contain three planets in orbits too close to the star to support liquid water. By avoiding fake...            

Super-Earth practically next door could be habitable2012-11-08

CNET You may think this planet is overpopulated or you may just be sick of the partisan politics. In either case, HD 40307g is an attractive getaway. by Less than 100 light years away, the new super-Earth could have fantastic beachfront properties. (Credit: Video screenshot by Tim Hornyak/CNET) It's only 42 light years away, it could have liquid water, and it's more than seven times...

Lonely 'homeless' planet found for the first time2012-11-14

The Daily Telegraph A young “homeless planet”, up to seven times the size of Jupiter and with no gravitational ties, has been spotted by scientists for the very first time. This Nasa illustration shows at night just before the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy, which is expected to happen about 3.75 billion years from now Photo:...

New super-Earth that may be just right to support life found2012-11-08

Zeenews London: Astronomers have discovered a new super-Earth planet around a nearby star that may have an Earth-like climate and be just right to support life. The new planet exists in the habitable zone of a nearby star and is part of a six-planet system. The system was previously thought to contain three planets in orbits too close to the star to support liquid water. By avoiding...

Earth’s twin found 42 light years from the Sun2012-11-09

Belfast Telegraph A ‘super-Earth’ that could have a life-supporting climate has been discovered in a multi-world solar system 42 light years from the Sun. The planet, which is several times more massive...            

 

Andreas Gursky : Alles im Fluss / Paul Rolans: Alles im Fluss

Alles im Fluss so lautet der Überschrift eines Zeitungsartikels  von Andreas Rossmann in der FAZ vom 25.10.2012 ,anlässlich der Ausstellung von Andreas Gursky im Düsseldorfer Museum Kunstpalast.
Hier ein Abschnitt über Andreas Gurskys Serie "Bangkok"  und „Ocean“ und danach einige Beispiele aus meinem Fotoprojekt "Images in Water" woran ich seit 2003 kontinuierlich arbeite und das ich in 2007 zum ersten Mal ausgestellt habe:
„Auch„Bangkok“, die neueste, 2011 entstandene Fotoserie von Andreas Gursky, glänzt. Was „Bangkok“, neun große Hochformate, je gut drei auf gut zwei Meter, mit Bangkok zu tun hat, erschließt sich optisch nicht, denn Bangkok wird auf„Bangkok“ nicht erkennbar. Kein Palast und kein Buddha, nur Wasser, und das uferlos, mit Lichtstreifen oder Lichtmosaiken, die der dunkle, unruhige Grund zurückwirft, mal als gezackte, gleißende Vertikale, deren grauer Schatten und orangefarbener Reflex parallel laufen, mal als amorphe, scheinbar fliegende Flecken. Der Grund ist schwarzweiß, dazwischen wimmeln kleine bunte, dunkelgelbe, türkis- und rosafarbene Punkte und Einsprengsel.
Von der Stadt ist nichts zu sehen, nur der Fluss Chao Phraya, der sich finster und schwerfällig durch sie wälzt und sie, so suggeriert der Titel „Bangkok“,ganz in sich aufgenommen hat. Wie andere Flüsse in anderen Megacitys führt er Unrat mit sich: Abfall und Astwerk, einen Autoreifen, eine Plastikflasche und ein Präservativ, Zeitungs- und auch Blütenblätter - Zivilisationsmüll, aber nicht als Mahlstrom, sondern in einzelnen Schnipseln. Schwarz ist das Wasser, aber fließt es wirklich? Es könnte auch Lava oder Teer, Öl oder Schlick sein. Abwasser. Sauber sieht anders aus.
Der Fluss reflektiert, quecksilbrig und unruhig. Die Oberfläche täuscht, ein Verblendungszusammenhang. Ist es die Sonne oder ein Scheinwerfer, der den Fluss anstrahlt? Was die Stadt nicht mehr braucht und ausstößt, wird vom Chao Phraya aufgenommen, mitgeschoben. „Alles im Fluss“ erhält einen doppelten Sinn. Hauptverkehrsader und ökologische Katastrophe, selbst glänzend und die Kehrseite des Glanzes.
Der Fluss ist, wie ihn diese Fotos darstellen, auch schön - und das ganz vordergründig und banal: Wie Lampions liegen und wippen die Lichter auf dem Wasser. Gursky hat die Fotos am Computer bearbeitet, nachgeschönt? Ihre Schönheit schärft ihren Schrecken. Nie war Gurskys Kunst der abstrakten Malerei- Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Ellsworth Kelly, auch Cy Twombly und Gerhard Richter - so nah.
Die „Bangkok“-Serie folgt den sechs „Ocean“-Bildern, die Gursky 2010 an die Grenzen des Darstellbaren führten: Mehr Welt, und das in quantitativem Sinn, als in diesen digital behandelten Satellitenbildern lässt sich auf einer Fotografie nicht erfassen. Auf einem von ihnen ragen Madagaskar, die Spitze der indischen Halbinsel, Sumatra und Westaustralien wie Fragmente in den riesigen, in vielen Tiefen blau ruhenden Ozean.“
Wer Andreas Gurskys Kunst begegnen will, muss sich ins Museum begeben. Im Katalog sind - nicht nur - die „Bangkok“-Fotos nicht groß genug, um ihren Charakter als Suchbilder ausspielen zu können und etwa die dümpelnden Abfallstücke erkennen zu lassen. Der Fotograf, der mit Aufnahmen von Jackson-Pollock-Bildern oder Ausschnitten aus Gemälden eines John Constable oder Vincent van Gogh die Malerei en detail reproduziert, verweigert sich der Reproduzierbarkeit:
Auch das ist ein Versuch Gurskys, der seine Bildfindungen digital „ausarbeitet und präzisiert“, sich von der klassischen Fotografie zu lösen und der Malerei anzunähern - als hätte sie sich nicht längst von ihr emanzipiert und es immer noch nötig, die Konkurrenz mit ihr aufzunehmen und ihren eigenen Kunstcharakter unter Beweis zu stellen."
Ich arbeite bereits seit 16 Jahren´auf diese Weise. Damals habe ich mein erstes großes Fotoprojekt "Bilder in Bäumen" / "Images in Trees" vorgestellt.

Hier folgen einige Videos von meiner Ausstellung „Alles im Fluss“ aus 2008: