Emmanuel Walderdorff Galerie, Molsberg
Opening: Sunday, 10th September 2023, 2 pm
Duration: 10.09. - 18.11.2023
In times of great innovation, in which the individual must also constantly reinvent himself, the collective longing for familiar certainties inevitably grows on the other side. For society, this describes a mechanism that is only temporarily valid and can produce good and bad things in equal measure. Art history, however, knows no other way. The conflict between innovation and continuity is its inevitable driving force, and at the same time can raise tricky questions: How can an artistic line be designed that does not lead in circles? How do I manage to create points of reference within my art without risking wear and tear?
Only a few succeed at the beginning of their artistic lives in developing a formal language that guarantees them the security of their very own expression without being corsetted. Franz Josef Altenburg and Pedro Boese are among these rare exceptions. But this is not the only analogy that has prompted us to complement the wonderful collaboration on Altenburg's retrospective exhibition at the Keramikmuseum Westerwald (15.07. - 19.11.2023) with a contemporary position from a different medium. Both artists work almost exclusively with basic geometric forms and have links to Concrete Art. In contrast to this, they are not concerned with a reduction to an abstract and universalist basis of form, but on the contrary - they are primarily searching for the origins of the individual.
Over decades, Altenburg created an impressively stringent oeuvre of ceramic miniatures which, in their paradoxical formal existence between constructivist basic features and organic plasticity, simultaneously condense the architectural and the sculptural in such a way that both flow into one another. His works revolve around archetypes of building, both formal and verbal: Scaffolding, towers, blocks. There is something literally constructive in everything, and yet also the becoming of an independent object. Throughout his life and in the course of tireless serial production, Altenburg searched for ideal forms without blurring the traces along the way. The craft on which his works are based thus reveals the special materiality of clay as well as the individuality of human skill. It is a work not against but with the specific characteristics of the material, and yet his objects are unmistakably Altenburg works.
The same applies to Pedro Boese's paintings and prints. Although his work is always based on a systematic idea, not only in terms of form but also in terms of color, it is characterized by a liveliness that is unusual in abstract art. His series are like finely tuned recipes, built on reproducible patterns and the expectations that a serial approach inevitably draws on. An essential characteristic of his works, however, is always the one ingredient that is able to change the signs: The subsequent abrasion of paint, the openness of a modular approach, the gap in the grid - Boese is always throwing sand into the gears of perception that kick in as soon as we recognize a system. In the parallel series now on display, it is tear-offs, overlays and cut-outs that contrast with a large, overarching grid of white lines, which continues across the width of the frame into the room to meet the stacked grids of Franz Josef Altenburg here with us.
Text by Julius Tambornino