OLIVER GRÖNE
TEXTS (SELECTION)
”In post-war modernism, the abstract image was always meant to be radical. They were advances by a vibrant avant-garde. This radicality no longer exists, because the images of European abstraction, American expressionism or colour field painting have entered the canon of art history and thus also my "imaginary museum". Today, I am more concerned with the meaning and essence of painting in general in a world of overflowing floods of images and freely associable levels of meaning. For me, painting consists above all of the edges between surfaces and forms of visual manifestation. Painting is an ordering of space. But the crucial question is: To what extent can one arrive at an essence of painting and how much world can a painting enclose."
(Oliver Gröne, 2020)
___
Exhibition “KABINETT”
Jarmuschek + Partner | April 27 – May 29, 2019
Those who know Oliver Gröne's previous works are already aware that there is no stagnancy for this artist. Whether 19th-century French landscape painting, birch forests, baroque still lifes or the modern compositions of Cubism and Pittura Metafisica - he repeatedly finds subjects, approaches and epochs with which he conducts a dialogue and raises old questions anew. The answers in his paintings are never mere rejection or adaptation, but always his own perspective and individual further development of a topic.
In his current exhibition he confronts us with a new main motif: the head.
His cabinet does not consist of real personalities shown in portraits, but rather of mysterious types, composed of collage-like arranged surfaces, elements and forms, which only suggest the figure and motivate the viewer to associate and assign: What makes a head a head and makes it a role, a character even without individual traits? Where are the boundaries? And what kind of personality could the figure depicted here be in the end?
Freely and not without humor, the artist plays with dimension, perspective and layer. He does not tier individual surfaces as is customary in the view, but rather superimposes them provocatively and seemingly arbitrarily with a conscious hint of three-dimensionality. At second glance one might assume that this is perhaps not about a human head at all, but about a distant sculpture from it, something disassembled and reconstructed.
Only because they are put in the appropriate place, tiny circles appear as eyes, a wave as mouth, or a dark part as beard. Rectangles and semicircles become noses and wavy silhouettes are enough to make out a hairstyle. Although single parts are given their own, completely new colours, far removed from natural realities, front surfaces and hair sometimes resemble much more the form and appearance of a heating pipe and tones such as pink, purple, blue or green should not actually allow any thoughts of facial features, Oliver Gröne manages to catch the head again and again in its basic composition. He hits the lowest common denominator of the subject, without even remotely contenting himself with the simplicity of the proverbial moon face of point, dot, comma and stroke. Complex and eager to experiment, he repeatedly varies the compositional approaches, finds new ways of forming and pushes abstraction to the extreme. In the end it is painting.
___
Exhibition “1921”
Jarmuschek + Partner | October 21 – December 2, 2017
Trees, landscapes and still lifes. On the basis of a thematically limited and yet inexhaustible quantity of subjects Oliver Gröne has been working about the impacts of European art history for a number of years. In doing so, his particular strength is not the rejection of what has already been achieved, but rather its adaptation and individual artistic development.
In his new series of works, the painter primarily plays with compositions from the 1920s. With great ease, he adduces aspects and elements of analytical cubism or Pittura Metafisica, combines them, sets them together, complements and exaggerates them.
Next to the covered gray of the still lifes by Braque and Picasso, Oliver Gröne places color fields of bright blue, yellow and pink. Once dogmatically appealing outlines and bodies transmitted strictly into the surface are quoted and at the same time overruled by the formation of pictorial space and illusionistic depth.
Opaque colour masses sometimes irritate the view of the beholder facing these paintings. As wide, undefined colour spaces full of light or shadow they are letting associations run freely. While concrete models are identifiable and objects such as landscape elements remain recognizable in some cases, Oliver Gröne here brings the abstraction to a head and, with outlines that can not be relatable, also gives a stage to the absurd. With great pleasure he experimentally plays with light acrylic and heavy oil paints and thus - among other things - finds the arrangement of the pictorial levels.
Like a declaration of love, Oliver Gröne takes up the contents of the 20th century - a century in which he has been socialized and whose society as well as visual world have been characterized by radical changes.
Dedicating his works particularly to the most formative utopia of freedom, Oliver Gröne combines an exploration of bodies, surfaces and layers on the background with atmospheric colour effects, abstraction and the compositions of pictorial space in a most unbiasedly and unconstrained manner. By condensing the already existent detached from historically determined categories and dogmas, he again opens the door to new utopias. Why limitations, one might like to ask.
___
Exhibition "Reissue Modified"
Jarmuschek+Partner | October 31, 2015 - January 16, 2016
With „Reissue Modified“ Jarmuschek+Partner presents current works by Oliver Gröne until 16 January. The exhibition offers an insight into the latest developements in the work of the Berlin-based artist.
After having created gestural and intensly colored paintings of rhythmically arranged birch trees and atmospherically charged thundery landscapes, Oliver Gröne turned to another subject in 2014: the floral still life. Inspired by art works of the Old Masters he re-deduces the subject with his own pastose and colourful painting. As if anticipating the evanescence of the shown object, the composition, perceived from a certain distance as arranged flower vases, vanishes into abstract colour gestures with a closer look.
Another new series of works has been created in 2015. Here, Oliver Gröne addressed himself to the still life with vessels and achieved an extraordinary high level of balance between abstraction and figurativeness. The series of five medium formats once again shows strong references to still lifes of the 17th century and the baroque chiaroscuro paintings by famous artists like Caravaggio, Anthonis van Dyck and Rembrandt in terms of atmosphere and colour. The black background and the radiant vessel parts build a powerful contrast, that emphasizes the tense relationship between colour and shape, and over that makes it intently perceptable. Particular sections oscillate between vanishing suface, concrete figurative proportionality and abstract colour space. Also the small formats, which especially display a lighter colour palette and occasionally stronger defined spatial relations, are playing with the recepient’s trained eye: The subject charged with art history seems to be directly present, but isn’t yet set - at second glance the viewer can find an architecture, a landscape, a totally different item here, as well... The intense occupation with and the final detachment from well-known baroque compositions induces the artist to reflect the groundbreaking achievements by the art history of the 20th century from Cubism to Colour Field Painting as well as to apply them in an again and again new, different and extempted way. Reissue Modified.
Oliver Grönes current works make the viewer sway between intellectual analysis and contemplative immersion. Another exhibition highlight can be found in two large-scale paintings, with which Oliver Gröne returns to the subject of forested landscapes and thus topically closes a circle. More abstract and tense than ever, the composition and painterly realization of these works seem to have gone through the prior experiments.
---
Exhibition "Kosmos"
Jarmuschek+Partner | March 12 - April 16, 2011
In an age characterised by technology and the preponderance of media related communication, the Berlin-based artist Oliver Gröne has commit- ted himself fully to the medium of landscape painting. Thus he places at the core of his artistic interest the interplay between man and nature, as- sociated with which are thoughts of a longing for harmony and seclusion, or alternatively the apparent luxury of a freedom of re ection that exists in painting.
In his painting style and the composition of his works, the artist repeatedly invokes important exponents of landscape painting who have also made a signi cant contribution to abstract art, such as the Barbizon school, especially Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet. However, Gröne carries their abstraction considerably further in that he breaks down that which he is depicting further and further and in so doing uncovers the surface structure and texture of the canvas. By means of a robust shift from warm to cold colours and from light to dark, the artist creates a unique sense of spatiality. For the observer, the notion that one is located in the middle of the picture, right inside the forest, is intensi ed by the depiction of partial tree trunks in the foreground, which largely obscure the section of land- scape behind. Any evidence of civilisation in Oliver Gröne’s paintings is mainly in the form of shadowy buildings, concrete blocks or fences. How- ever, these serve mainly to clarify and de ne the spatiality of the work and stand as a symbol of the invincibility of nature as far as man is concerned.
In his rst solo exhibition at the ‘Halle am Wasser’ Arts Centre, Gröne shows his new series ‘Kosmos’. In these pictures, all of which bear the titles of works by Barnett Newman, the artist is concerned more than ever with the spatial perception in a painting and also the effect of colour and surface. By means of the large format (190 x 300 cm) and his use of
primary colours, he makes reference to the founder of Colour Field Painting and in a similar manner invites the observer to be drawn into the atmosphere evoked by the painting, to absorb it and to rediscover them- selves in nature as it is portrayed there. He thus also takes up the theme of the sublime in painting, particularly in landscape painting, which Newman dealt with too. In his paintings, Newman found his way to the in uence of the sublime through monochrome Colour Field Painting. Oliver Gröne also uses large format and the effect of colour to convey a sense of the sublime and to succeed in evoking a contemplative, re ective reaction in the observer.
The use of impasto on the surface and the clearly visible texture of the materials transform the view of the tree trunks in the foreground into a haptic, tactile experience, through which layer after layer of the pain- staking creative process becomes evident.
A series of small format paintings has also evolved in which the artist refers back to the intense contrasts between light and dark which charac- terise Baroque paintings. In these works, he deals primarily with the special light effect of the Dutch painter Rembrandt: a diffuse light, which seems to shine straight out of the picture, generating a wholly unique atmosphere. Gröne adopts this lighting effect and perpetuates it in an almost mono- chrome manifestation of abstraction, where all that is concrete disappears from view.
Oliver Gröne’s pictures are captivating; their aura brings home to us the smallness of man in relation to the universe as well as our own existential helplessness and subjection.
Christina Neumaier