DANIEL M.E. SCHAAL, MARIA SEITZ

—Wassily Kandinsky, (From Point and Line to Plane, ca. 1910)

Lines are everywhere we look. In It’s All about the Line duo show, Maria Seitz and Daniel Schaal refer to the Line, transforming it into the central protagonist of the exhibition and creating a new perspective on geometrical abstraction. The show brings together the variety of mediums: painting, drawing, printmaking, and installation—all unified by the Line.

For decades, the Line has inspired generations of artists – starting from pioneer abstractionists Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, moving to Pete Mondrian’s De Stijl and culminating in Hard-Edge paintings by Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. Horizontal, vertical or diagonal, straight or curved, thick or thin, through their character and direction lines can communicate the entire emotional spectrum – feelings of permanence and solidity, harmony and energy, rhythm and movement, or even chaos and destruction.

The same applies to the presented works. Through the serial structures and ritual repetition of the same action, painting and drawing the Line again and again, the artists transmit various messages. Daniel Schaal replaces personal expression with performative imprints, creating a symbiosis between image and body, which culminates in the new aesthetics of anthropological abstraction. In his experiments with prints, produced with old packaging materials, the artist expresses criticism of capitalism, throwaway mentality and the modern ‘homo consumens’. Maria Seitz is particularly interested in the surface- and space-forming potential of the Line and creates unique colour transformations with minimal graphic means. Within urban surroundings the artist’s window installations bring up new relations between drawing and the architecture of the building.