All
six artists work with the conceptual aspects of ‘formalism’
as it relates to forms of presentation and participated in
the recent exhibition Formalismus in the Hamburger Kunstverein
in 2004. In addition, the artists share an interest in the
now neglected utopian, irrational side of modern art, which
Sol LeWitt in the first of his famous ‘Sentences’ described
with the words: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than
rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot
reach.”
Transcending the tradition that, in its questioning of the
artwork as a closed, physically present entity, solely deals
with the semantic discrepancy between concept and execution,
this next generation of artists is less concerned with the
inherited reading of modern art than with exactly those fractures
and byways of modernism in which its utopian dimensions surface.
Common for these artists is a fascination with the inheritance
from minimalism and conceptual tendencies of the 1960s, a
weakness for conceptual gestures and an abstract formal vocabulary.
The obvious contradiction contained in the title, to ‘logically’
follow ‘irrational thoughts’, can thus be considered as programmatic
for the exhibited works. Because precisely in the turning
back to the mystical quality of art, emphasised in the writings
of Sol LeWitt, the intrusion of the real – references to
fashion, everyday life, design or popular culture – can be
implemented in abstract images.
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