Markus Amm
Markus Amm: painting’s modern alchemist reflects on perfecting pigments
When German artist Markus Amm applies oil paint to his canvas, he has an innate sense of what the result will be. Pigments, oil, thinner and binding agents run over gesso boards to create vivid layers of colour that can take days, weeks and even months to apply. The results, Amm says, are always exciting and can be surprising – both good and bad.
‘Pigments can have a different weight, they can combine differently. It’s like a game of ping pong,’ he explains, reflecting on his complex working process. ‘For instance a speck반점 of dust could fly into the paint and I may have to wipe it out. It’s a constant reaction to what's going on. I’m playing my part, and then seeing how the material is reacting. As I can’t completely control the process, the result is always open; it’s like alchemy.’알커미,연금술
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1967, Amm studied graphic design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach. He has lived in London, Berlin, and now Geneva, becoming internationally known through participation in major group shows on painting.
An incredibly versatile변덕스런 artist, Amm is celebrated for his modernist photograms, luminograms, sculptures, oil paintings and drawings that reside somewhere between the avant-garde movement and futurism.
‘Pigments can have a different weight, they can combine differently. It’s like a game of ping pong,’ he explains, reflecting on his complex working process. ‘For instance a speck반점 of dust could fly into the paint and I may have to wipe it out. It’s a constant reaction to what's going on. I’m playing my part, and then seeing how the material is reacting. As I can’t completely control the process, the result is always open; it’s like alchemy.’알커미,연금술
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1967, Amm studied graphic design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach. He has lived in London, Berlin, and now Geneva, becoming internationally known through participation in major group shows on painting.
An incredibly versatile변덕스런 artist, Amm is celebrated for his modernist photograms, luminograms, sculptures, oil paintings and drawings that reside somewhere between the avant-garde movement and futurism.
In spring of last year, just before the opening of his mid-career retrospectiveg회고하는 at Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel, Switzerland, the German artist found himself with an unusually empty studio and an exciting invitation to create a completely new body of work for David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.
‘Paintings can hang around in my studio for up to four years before I let them out,’ he muses. ‘Normally I have boards prepared that I can work on, but this time, for David Kordansky, it was a completely new body of work. I was working on a daily basis from morning until evening to get this show done. The pressure is always there, even if I were to have double the amount of time. It’s to do with personal ambition – you always want to do the best you can do.’
Opened at Kordansky’s 12,000 sq ft space, which was designed by the architect Kulapat Yantrasast, Amm’s latest showcase comprises around 17 small but mesmerising마음사로잡는 oil on gesso board works, each measuring from around 13 3/4 x 11 7/8 to 29 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches. Looking at these luminous rectangles of layered paint is like staring into deep pigmented pools of water.
The installation of the show was a collaborative process between Amm and David Kordansky. The most recently completed works, Amm says, have taken on a darker mood. ‘Perhaps to do with the fact that they were painted in Switzerland during the autumn and winter months,’ he ventures, noting: ‘This is a new development for me.’
The prospect of filling the spacious South La Brea Avenue gallery space with these relatively small works was, he admits, a rather daunting벅찬,돈트 prospect, but by no means insurmountable극복할수 없는. ‘I realised in Basel that I could play with a really big space, even with small formats,’ he smiles. ‘After this, I think I can handle it.’
Illusionism in painting is long past being a given, yet there is still something exhilarating신나는 about work that breaks the fourth wall and brings us into the game — art that fixes our attention on how it is made, the mechanisms behind its effects.
Markus Amm's recent paintings at David Kordansky Gallery, with their luminous layers and crusty edges, incite just such rousing engagement.
Amm stretches linen over panels and builds up thick, smooth gesso work surfaces. He pours, pulls, spreads and strokes thinned oil paint on top, sometimes sanding between layers. The sense of pictorial space is at once deep, aqueous 물기먹은,에퀴어스 and nonliteral. Edges where the gesso has accumulated surround the still plane like a rugged shoreline, rimed with color. These paintings have sculptural presence on the wall, and yet they read as internal weather events.
One of the 17 untitled works is predominantly대부분 crimson, with gold and green along the sides and a dark dimple that suggests the heart of a blossom, close-up, blurred. The palette smolders.
A gorgeous image of rectangular pools of violet is reminiscent of Rothko. Passages in other works recall the stain paintings of Helen Frankenthaler and the veils of Morris Louis. Some details conjure마술하다 atmospheric tempests excised from J.M.W. Turner or George Inness. A broad swath베다 of art history is contained in these dense, little panels, from the Romantic Sublime on up.
Amm, who was born in Stuttgart, Germany, and is based in Geneva, creates work that is immersive but not by way of immensity. Some pieces measure an intimate 13 inches by 11 inches. The largest is slightly more than 2 feet in height. Rather than physically enveloping the body, they urge us close, then closer, to marvel at the immediacy and expansiveness of paint.
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