Kienzle Art Foundation presents Show 4:
Klaus Merkel / early 1980s / late 1980s
September 3, 2011 – March 24, 2012
Opening: Friday September 2, 2011
7-9PM
From September 3, 2011 through March 24, 2012, the Kienzle Art Foundation will present its Show 4:
Klaus Merkel / early 1980s / late 1980s. This exhibition will once again focus on the programmatic orientation and specific content that are Jochen Kienzles primary interests. They center on discursive queries concerning the creation of pictures.
In retrospect, looking at the 1980s facilitates a clarification and a more concise insight into how the protagonists of the day conceived their oeuvre. At the time, Klaus Merkel suggested a definition of painting that soon turned out to be a special path with a valid statement. The latter formed the basis for the increasingly differentiated strategies of his work.
In the early 1980s, Merkels paintings were primarily dominated by a grey Southern German Palette whose motives were based entirely on a sparse painting process with linear excerpts. Cluster-like arrangements formed ensembles filling entire walls. Picture and object were dealt with on one plane. In his 1984 essay Markus Brüderlin referred to Merkels current painting as a tool kit wherein the picture surface is comparable to a topographically thick ocean underscoring the preliminary character of the works. He pointed out that the formats took as their point of reference their handiness vis-à-vis a physical counterpart, especially in such instances where his head-high stele pictures insinuated directly anthropomorphic proportions and scales.
In the mid-80s the artist, by now in his mid-thirties, changed the mode of conceiving his oeuvre into a system-building, discursive type of painting. Its main characteristics were serial motif-types, standardized, loud colors, and an unusual selection of formats. A type of painting thatwhile insisting on its sensualitywas also intent on demonstrating the dismantling of paintings canon of values. Klaus Merkel confirmed the end of his early work phase by exhibiting his ensembles in extreme ways. He then went on to emphasize the complex interdependencies between the individual panel and the conditions of its presentation. Perpetuating the latter as painting motifs, they define his oeuvre to this day.
Both phases of these heterogeneous painting concepts will be assembled in the upcoming exhibition
Klaus Merkel / early 1980s / late 1980s.
This is the first time that the Kienzle Art Foundation will present, in tandem with the artist, a selection of works as conglomerate and condensate drawn from the foundations holdings as well as other public and private loans.
Klaus Merkel (born in 1953 in Heidelberg) studied painting with Peter Dreher in Freiburg in the 1970s.
Completely unimpressed by the revival of narrative tendencies in the 1980s, he unswervingly stuck to his nonrepresentational painting. Numerous public and private collections in Germany and abroad own works by Klaus Merkel.
Kienzle Art Foundation
Bleibtreustr.54
10623 Berlin
Opening times: Tursday – Friday 2 – 7 pm, Saturdays 11 – 4 pm