Painting, as It Were (Painting as Is III). Group show at Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf, Germany. 2024
Curated by Heidi Hahn & Tim Wilson with Yeşim Akdeniz, Benjamin Butler, Emily Kraus, Linda Nadji, Christopher Page, Mary Ramsden, Tim Wilson
Painting, as It Were (Painting as Is III), the third installment of Painting as Is, an ongoing curatorial collaboration between New York based artists Heidi Hahn and Tim Wilson. As with all of these shows, Hahn and Wilson seek to bring together groups of artists that hold a keen interest in the blunt facts of painting. Facts, that when deployed, demonstrate a wide range of pictorial languages that stretch across and live within abstraction and representation—performing a kind of formal calland-response that is tethered to painting’s rich history but also give rise to each artist’s unique voice. While on the one hand, the works in these shows demonstrate a well understood formal and selfreflexive nature of an art making practice, the crux is rather more to do with an insistent belief, that is simultaneously bound up with a high level of doubt, that the manipulation and rearrangement of the objects of material world can somehow transform into objects of meaning—whatever they may be. These readings, like much of our understanding of the perceptual world, are conjectures that serve as evidence of the porous threshold through which inert materials pass into thought. Part of the third edition of „Painting as Is“ are works by Yeşim Akdeniz, Benjamin Butler, Emily Kraus, Linda Nadji, Christopher Page, Mary Ramsden and Tim Wilson.
In this iteration, we have Emily Kraus’ algorithmic analog process based abstraction. Works that seem to recall the digital visualization of sound wave forms or film sequencing—like Muybridge’s galloping horses seen all at once. In the tradition of the poured paintings of Morris Louis, Richter’s squeegee, or Jack Whiten’s “developer”, Kraus has invented a complex cubical apparatus—a kind of Turing machine that manifest large scale works that envelope the viewer with the haptic residue of her stochastic process. As if mimicking patterns found in nature, these works serve as mediative screens of contemplation.
