#TOUR

The works of the Berlin-based artist Max Neumann (*1949), with his silhouette figures and faceless heads, elude comprehensible narrative interpretation. The colour fields and space abstractions surrounding these anonymous protagonists elevate the portrayal – beyond the categories of time and place – into the realm of the universal. Other figurative or objective elements in the works do provide an abundance of conceptual allusions but fail to resolve the surreal limbo of their presumably significant juxtaposition. Neumann’s paintings and works on paper remain enigmatic and evoke associations with our own dreams and fears. They confront their observers as pictorial metaphors of a darker side of people, clearly in the sense of an alter ego that reflects and thus outwardly conveys the depths of our own inner being.

At the same time, Max Neumann’s works have an impressive painting and graphic quality. The eye scans – almost tangibly – the internal structures of the predominantly black, white and red image sections. You can recognise the artist’s willingness to pursue even coincidences and intuitive, pictorial settings in his work processes. You can appreciate the balanced image compositions, which evoke a certain calmness despite all the unsettling content and which can contrast the inner darkness with a little brightness and lucidity.

Max Neumann and Andreas Grunert (*1947) are connected by a longstanding friendship that has continued since their residence fellowship together at Villa Romana in Florence in 1986. The works of both artists meet not only in their formal and pictorial aspiration; they also display comparable fundamental views in respect of an artistic creation that leads to spaces open to interpretation and that is based on existential questions of being.

Andreas Grunert’s works are characterised by a poetic breadth. His formally reduced image spaces, which are generally not more precisely defined, feature human figures, animals, trees and plants, as well as everyday objects, not as likenesses but rather as meaningful symbols. In their pictorial juxtaposition, they trigger intuitive thought processes that lead beyond the factually comprehensible and into the realms of possibility. A display area divided into two halves with bright colours can become a landscape, and the infinity symbol therein can become the path of a figure walking through it.

Elsewhere, two typographical quotation marks at the sides of the picture span the area, which is monochrome owing to its emptiness other than two small donkeys, and thus refer to the realm of the unpronounceable – with an ironically cheerful refraction.

The pieces by Max Neumann and Angela M. Flaig (*1948) meet on level 2, with rich contrast and yet with a harmony of existential content depth.
For more than four decades the artist Angela M. Flaig (*1948), who lives near Rottweil, has focused on the marks of life. Her early works since the mid-1970s appear minimalist and related to Arte Povera, revealing the sensitive view of the effects of everyday use of common materials, through paper folding, tracing and rust marks on paper. The artist’s work with plant seeds began in the 1990s with the question of which marks the fine roots of seedlings leave on carrier paper, and this has characterised her work ever since.

Symbolising the continuous cycle of life – becoming and passing away, the constant possibility of new growth – Angela M. Flaig develops flat or stereometrically structured reliefs with the flying seeds collected in the area around her home. In addition, there are objects that take on elementary, archaic forms, such as that of a die, a house or a bowl, the latter being reminiscent of the precious, protective gesture of the hands. With her ephemeral work materials, which you would otherwise ideally notice flying past, Angela M. Flaig creates light-filled works in a number of senses. A refugee’s harvest gains a transcendental dimension.

In dialogue with Angela M. Flaig’s work, the paintings by Anna Leonhardt on level 3 at KUNSTWERK particularly emphasise the metaphysical impact of abstract painting. In her clearly procedural method, the artist, who was born in Pforzheim in 1981 and who now lives in New York and Berlin, creates image spaces with an almost magical vibrancy.
Many thin, overlapping layers of oil paint applied with the palette knife initially produce rectangular fields on the canvas. Their edges, as well as colour drips across the sides of the picture base, reveal a gradual search for the ultimate pictorial form. Colour gradients in the spaces elicit three-dimensional qualities, sometimes enhanced into the tangibly plastic. Together with the effect of the colour on the pictorial space, they give Leonhardt’s image structure a spatial resonance with varying strength of reach.

The restrained, phased mood of Anna Leonhardt’s paintings, underpinned by a dove blue/grey colour tone, transforms into more intense colour combinations in the newer pieces. Furthermore, the arrangement of colour areas is broken up. Gestural forms that appear to have been thrown together float into or in front of horizontally structured yet softly modulated backgrounds extending to an unfathomable depth.

Quasi and Das Prin…, paintings presented on level 3, which were created by Max Neumann in the early 1980s, convey a certain inner struggle. His almost eruptive, gestural and handwritten early works stand alongside the drawings – reminiscent of comic strips – by the artist Ambra Durante, who was born in Genoa in 2000 and has lived in Berlin since 2007. Just as you might entrust recent experiences, discoveries and feelings to a diary, she initially committed her reflections to a scenographic record, influenced by the medium of film. She first came to public attention with her graphic novel Black Box Blues, published in book form in 2020, which is both personal and yet also universally representative of the crises of growing up.

The exhibited pieces by Ambra Durante also appear to be rendered in “such a deceptively light hand […and] brightened by the dance-related joke of graphical intelligence” (Daniel Kehlmann).
On torn-out wrapping paper, densely packed written, figurative and objective notes are evocative of the sometimes disordered onslaught of thoughts that flow one on top of the next. This impression continues even when drawings on the backs of shooting cards are presented in a grid. However, it is precisely in their open juxtaposition that the pieces and the graphic elements they contain – supported by the image titles – convey associative spaces that lead into the lifeworld of the artist.