Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg

MARIANNA UUTINEN
Wait Light
31 August 2017 – 28 January 2018

The Finnish artist Marianna Uutinen (*1961) is presenting new works in the Kunst-Station in the main train station and at the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg. Since her studies, Marianna Uutinen has consistently plumbed the possibilities of non-representational painting. Her intensive examination of this traditional medium goes far beyond conventional techniques and opens up new perspectives on painting, which has frequently been declared dead. The colour spaces and bodies of colour that she creates oscillate between the nearly monochrome and, in part, bold colourfulness, between opulence and incisive sparseness, spontaneity and calculation, movement and rest, surface and space. The result is a concentrated, diverse experience of painting that lingers in one’s memory for a long time.

To create her works, Marianna Uutinen removes layers of acrylic paint from one canvas and applies them to new canvases like a fragile skin, with several layers laid over one another. As a result, each new layer negates the previous one, which, nonetheless, continues to shine through. Uutinen succeeds in generating a twofold appearance of concealing and revealing.

In the Kunst-Station, Marianna Uutinen leaves behind the closed, clearly delimited pictorial system of the canvas and establishes a reference to the surrounding architecture. Since the colour extends into the surrounding space, it loses the protection of the autonomous boundary of the picture and intervenes in alien contexts. The result of this borderless, unfettered painting is quasi a walk-through picture. The encounter with Uutinen’s painting in the main train station is a physical challenge for viewers. It integrates the public in an aesthetic event that also incorporates the architecture. Perception and recognition are set free and models and versions of the world become negotiable.