Bernd Kugler

Erwin Gross

16 Jan - 23 Feb 2013

© Erwin Gross
V., 2012
Acrylic, pigment on cotton
123 x 250 cm
ERWIN GROSS
16 January - 23 February 2013

Galerie Bernd Kugler is proud to announce the third solo exhibition by Erwin Gross, presenting four most recent, large-sized paintings.

Erwin Gross’ first international recognition was in fact a ›farewell‹. Ever since he presented his Farewell Painting at documenta 7 in 1982, his artistic struggle has been to accept the ephemeral condition of reality and its immaterial reminiscences in perception. Still, as all factual data fades he installs his paintings as places of resistance.

Colour, in every moment being form and content alike, generates and brings forth the images. Colour is the undulant, shapeless primordial matter, out of which all light, forms and figures arise. For Gross, colour does not depict reality; it creates it in the first place. More than this, in itself it is reality.

In the dense drift or colour-fog upon his canvases, all of a sudden, silhouettes and spectres seem to appear, only to dissolve again in the very next blink of an eye. Letting the pictorial space hoveringly adhere in the interstice between gestalt and shapelessness, between accumulating sediment and swept off substance.
As Coosje van Bruggen has put it: »In the mist, things appear larger« (in: documenta 7, vol. 2, Kassel 1982, p. IX). And thus, Erwin Gross reinstates sensible presence by means of mere colour: taking leave of reality, embracing the virtual.

Letting the pictorial space hoveringly adhere in the interstice between gestalt and shapelessness, between accumulating sediment and swept off substance.

Christian Malycha
 

Tags: Coosje van Bruggen, Erwin Gross