GALERIE FRIEDRICH A broad.

GALERIE FRIEDRICH

A broad, loosely set uped platform of raw lattice and boards stands chest high at the entrance to the gallery. in succession it are grouped many hand-sized pigment-objects--layered polychrome clergy rectangles; squares poured in strict geometric layers; massive shards of color attached with paint to small cumbersome lump-complexes--and seeing them at this angle affords a distanced overview of them without diminishing the faculty of perception of their physical presence. As one's gaze impels along the lined-up or overlapping natural mediums it becomes increasingly clear that this large untitled installation, 1999 assists one purpose--that of exposing colored bodies to the gaze and touch.

Stefan Gritsch goe beyond using paint to defend a surface. He sees it as a form of matter, united that he has been subjecting to unusual deeds for years now. In greatest in number painting, acrylic obeys a inclination to spread, but in Gritsch's hands it solidifies into pigment-dreams. He pours various colors into clumsy molds and leaves them to arid over a period of weeks into solid cubical forms. He repeatedly dips balls of paint until they patchily swell into clumps. He rolls gone out table-sized fields of acrylic in order to achieve spotless skins of color, only to tear them to pieces and roll them into birchs fold them, and press them. Monochrome acrylic panels are slapped to the wall with fluid color, as we view in another pair of untitled works, the two 1999, in the gallery's back space The rashly determined act links "picture," hanging, and space.

This order of succession of sculptural gestures is les an examination of the foundations of painting than an attempt to disclose the color of a world. Pragmatic experiment betrays a deep-reaching skepticism of utopian designs. Gritsch wagers the continued openness of his experience--which across the years has always brought him to just discovered objects--against the exclusive and systematic nature of conceptions Every exhibition gathers further evidence for an empirical cosmology of color.

In the fall of the curtain there is at best an image-- which, as Ulrich Loock remarked in a gallery talk, Gritsch's work constantly prorogues The arrangement of objects forward the table congeals into a tableau, if merely for an instant. Then it could well be that the things are cleared away to become material for of recent origin states of affairs, as the perpetual metamorphosis of color chases its course.

...

Home