Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Raimund Girke. 1986/1999 in the Patio Gallery. The exhibition, as the title suggests, shows a selection of paintings from the last two decades of Girke's oeuvre, and celebrates the publication Between White / Was weiss das Weiss, published in two languages by Borgerhoff & Lamberigts in September 2022, in close collaboration with the Estate Raimund Girke, and numerous museums, archives, kunsthallen, and fellow artists and other contemporaries who provided precious historical material.
In the postwar avant-garde, Raimund Girke was one of the few painters who stuck to the traditional, two-dimensional application of oil paint with a brush on canvas or paper. For him, a painting was a dialogue, a movement, a performance, between the artist's intentions, and a support. That result was an expression of the tension between controlled expression and the will of the body's movements, which is certainly the case with large-format works:
The movement always starts in your whole body and can really be lived out in front of a large canvas. There is no need to stop suddenly. You can walk the length of the paintings. You are not fixed to one point. 1
However, this was not done by artists connected to Art Informel (nevertheless important for young artist's development as a student) or Abstract Expressionism. Always preserving the structure of almost vibrating cohesive lines, Girke saw painting as a form of writing. In a 2001 interview, he pointed to the same character used in Japanese for both painting and writing.
If the parallel with writing is drawn, one must talk about language. In the late 1950s, Girke decided that white became his modus operandi, his formal way of expression. Not as an achrome, but as the purest, most intense colour, evoking the immaterial, the quiet, the empty. His oeuvre was dedicated to exploring the possibilities of its application, its presence or absence – with an often ethereal or elemental result, sometimes seemingly reductive but always complex in structure. The works from the last dozen years, shown here, are also characterised by dark colours such as grey, blue, and ochre, which intensify and sharpen the white, turn away from the static, and exhibit movement through the repetition of contrast.
The socio-political developments in Germany and Europe during the 1980s are interesting in the light of Girke's oeuvre. On several occasions, he participated in exhibitions showing the art of the 'Bundesrepublik Deutschland', including in Berlin and Dresden, or in Scandinavia and Asia. Girke travelled to Osaka in 1988 for an event in which artists made kites that were released into the air in a traditional manner and subsequently displayed at a travelling exhibition – where Girke's kite hung alongside those of Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. In 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Girke participated in the exhibition Ambiente Berlin at the Italian Pavilion of the 44th Venice Biennale. At the same time, as in the 1960s, his work continued to be shown at exhibitions on the many interpretations of the monochrome, such as Radical Painting in Williamstown, MA (1984), La Couleur Seule in Lyon (1989), Nonfigurative Malerei / Essentielle Malerei in Wiesbaden (1989) or the travelling exhibition Die Sprache der Farbe (1992).
Even more important, are the several retrospective exhibitions organised during this period, which asked the artist to look over his shoulder at his own oeuvre. The exhibition, Arbeiten auf Leinwand und Papier, at Kunstverein Braunschweig was followed by important touring exhibitions in 1986, 1988, and 1995, prompting Girke to return to museums that have been meaningful to him: for example, the Sprengel Museum Hannover or the Schloss Morsbroich Leverkusen – the first museum to acquire a work by Girke (in 1961).
An interesting return to certain elements can be noticed in his work from this period. Some titles return, such as Schichtung (a title that occurred more often, for example in 1957 – a work now in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen). The horizontal arrangement and impasto application of paint, core to the work of the 1950s, was sometimes reapplied, with vastly different results, being experiences of three decades of art richer. The ochres and blues, "earth colours / the colours of matter / colours between day and night / colours of the shadow," as he wrote in 1995, also reappear on the surface.2 At least, that is what the viewer's experience would perceive: in fact, they are the undertones on which white structures and layers, sometimes impulsive and dynamic, are built upon. Just as he referred more often to the 1950s in the 1980s, "where the unanticipated, imponderables, also slip in and are accepted," the decade later, the 1960s-70s were a source of reference:
__I'm inclined to believe that since the early 1990s I've been going through another phase where I'm increasingly referencing my paintings of the early 1960s and 70s, where the paintings are becoming more tranquil again, more cohesive, more open-ended and yet more unified, where the colour or pictorial field is not ploughed up by brushstrokes. (...) I believe that right now my paintings are again imbued with a largesse, a certain tranquillity and peace. __
The artist passed away in 2002 and in 2001, he said: "If painting, literature, or music really have power, are intense and true, then that is like a living entity radiating an energy of its own. I move within light as matter, even better perhaps, with light as colour, light manifested in colour."3
Recently, a number of developments occurred in the continuity of appreciation of Raimund Girke's work. A few museums organised exhibitions following on from the initiatives of the 1960s, of which Monochrome Malerei (Schloss Morsbroich, Udo Kultermann, 1960) was the start, and Weiss auf Waiss (Kunsthalle Bern, Harald Szeemann, 1966) the then-ending point. Most noteworthy is the exhibition NOTHINGTOSEENESS at Berlin's Akademie der Künste in 2021, which, referring to John Cage, showed a collection of artworks with an absence of colour. Here, Girke found himself in the company of Manzoni, Schoonhoven, Castellani, Fontana and Ryman, among others.
The monograph Raimund Girke: Between White / Was weiss das Weiss was published in October 2022 both in English and in German. The book spans a monumental 536 pages and includes new essays by Anke Hervol, Peter Iden, and Florian Illies, complemented by newly translated texts by Dietmar Elger and Gottfried Boehm, along with never-before-seen photographic and archival material. The book is the result of intensive collaboration with the Estate Raimund Girke, as well as with numerous museums, kunsthallen and archives, as well as many contemporaries of the artist: curators, critics, and fellow artists or their descendants.
Museums also attached attention to Girke's oeuvre through solo exhibitions. In June 2022, the long-awaited retrospective Klang der Stille opened at Museum Küppersmuhle, the result of a precise selection of 130 works from important museum and private collections, complemented by several key works from the Estate Raimund Girke. Besides photographs, the exhibition catalogue also contained texts by Walter Smerling (who was curating his 100th exhibition with this one, along with co-curator Madeleine Girke), Florian Illies and Peter Iden.
The exhibition Gespannte Ruhe at the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden shows, until 22 January 2023, works on paper between 1957-2001. All these works are now in the collection of the SKD Dresden, as a result of a donation from the artist in 1990, and from his widow Karin Girke in 2021. An exhibition of works by Albert Venus – one of the most outstanding representatives of Dresden late romanticism – takes place simultaneously with the presentation of Girke's work. But, as the Kupferstich-Kabinett communicates, "Girke's analytical gaze reflects an approach to nature that has surprisingly romantic features."
Axel Vervoordt Gallery
Kanaal
Stokerijstraat 19
Wijnegem
Antwerp, 2110
Belgium
www.axel-vervoordt.com
+32 335 533 00
Saturday
11am – 6pm