SURFACE WORKS at Galerie Max Hetzler, London, 2023

Ida Ekblad, Günther Förg, Joan Mitchell, Albert Oehlen, Rebecca Warren
41 Dover Street, W1S 4NS London
25 April - 27 May 2023
‘Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work.’ With these words the Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell explained her relationship to painting and abstraction. On its own, abstraction was for Mitchell an empty shell. As a label it had come to characterise too much and too little all at once. Non-descript, beyond its non-objective implications, abstraction was quite simply not cut out for the job. Surface work was less hyperbolic, but far more fit for purpose. In one stroke it evoked the act of painting, and the painted surface. Gesture, as well as colour and texture were part and parcel of this definition which stressed the importance of the material surface over the more ambiguous idea of abstraction.
In her all-over compositions Mitchell demonstrates what surface work is and how it can express feeling. Take Untitled, 1956, and Tilleul, 1978 - in both instances Mitchell deploys bold, swift bundles of lines, which lend structure to the images, while also referencing landscapes and nature. Through surface work, Mitchell builds an aesthetic construction which extends beyond her own work to encompass that of others who have invested form, space, texture and gesture with meaning. The work of Albert Oehlen, of which FM 18, 2008, is an example, is also premised on the movements, rhythms and systems of a surface work. By bringing together an array of gestural elements, Oehlen engages with the long history of abstraction which he challenges and renews through the worked surfaces. Like him, Günther Förg endeavours to comment on, but also break free from the art historical bind that frequently sets contemporary art in dialogue with the past.
Presented here are a series of works, all made in 2009, showing Förg’s attempt to make sense of colour and form on his own terms. The repetitive nature of the coloured marks in the oil on paper monotypes, all titled a die leine, 2009, recall a type of mindless scribbling that is at once explosive and contained. By a similar account, the two mostly landscapes, 2009, paintings use vivid colour and bold brushstrokes to express the intersection between form and the memory of nature which lingers on the surface work. In all of Förg’s works there is a close link between the architecture of the composition and its materialisation on the ground surface. On the whole, Förg’s are surface works that yield a preoccupation with processes of fragmentation and memory.
Ida Ekblad’s paintings contain a riotous energy. Inspiration is taken from a multitude of sources - archives of different kinds, film and music all come together to furnish Ekblad’s eclecticism. To unite such an animated mix of images, Ekblad calls on a variety of techniques and materials. In the case of the triptych FJORD IN HER FUTURE, 2023, and in the three works on paper, all 2023, she focuses her attention on oil painting and through this centuries-old technique marks the surface of the canvases with vigorous strokes. In the latter works the surface is laden with bursts of colour, while in the triptych the pictorial rhythm is dictated by the diverging patterns, each jostling for attention. Ekblad exploits the cacophony of the surface work to convey a kaleidoscopic range of feelings.
The surfaces of Rebecca Warren’s bronze sculptures are often given another work-over with paint so that it roils with the ground, articulating, dissolving and dredging information from what lies beneath. Kutoff (2020), has a gap derived from the sculpture-with-hole period of art history (also the heyday of UFO paranoia) and a toothy set of paint drips that make a strange kind of digital moiré pattern. Jumper (2020) is inscribed with an obscure glyph on one side and a lattice of colour on the other. It is the mix of all these elements that gives her sculptures their peculiar, alien natures, which Warren has said comes from an 'obscure zone of the mind or extra-human source.' She has also said of these works that she ‘wanted them to be somehow denser than previous bronzes in order to integrate them completely with their painted surfaces, making them more concentrated, more intense.’
- Flavia Frigeri, April 2023
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