Christian Frosch
EW - paint research - April 17 until May 15, 2021
"Is Christian Frosch a painter? Or is he not perhaps a scientist in disguise? Frosch does not make it quite so easy for us to answer this question unequivocally, because his art breaks completely new ground. He definitely distrusts all clichés of art and especially of painting, as his early series "Anatomical-Pathological Collection Painting" already shows. He counters the ingeniously creative and wildly gesticulating image of the Prince of Painters with his experimental arrangements of painting, as it were soberly and yet mischievously, and is content in his art simply to permanently ask: "What does colour do? And what can colour do?" (Tobias Hoffmann)
In October 2000, I showed "Paint research" by Christian Frosch for the first time in the gallery's second exhibition. After numerous solo exhibitions with Frosch over the past twenty years, I am now looking forward, together with you, to the results of his latest research: the group of works EW.
"Ice cubes are made from watercolour paint.
These are dropped onto a sheet of paper in a frozen state.
The coloured ice cubes melt, the colour water dries up."
Frosch's working instructions for the EW series sound simple. No mention is made of the numerous experiments Frosch undertook with papers and inks and various commercially available ice cube moulds, up to and including an ice cube machine, nor of the development of special racks for drying the papers. This time, too, it took two years from the painting researcher's first idea to the work of art.
Looking at the last group of works, "Leonardo", one had the impression of seeing the flight and impact of the sponge soaked in paint. The new paper works "EW" impress with their luminous colourfulness. Each ice cube has coloured and deformed the paper where it happened to fall, and each ice chip, no matter how small, has left a coloured crystalline trace on the sheet. They offer the viewer a wide spectrum of possible associations, ranging from aerial views of the Mecklenburg Lake District to microscopic sections of precious stones, for example.
I look forward to your associations.
In the cabinet we show an overview of twenty years of research on and with the materials of painting. There is much to discover.
Installation photos: David Ertl.