Abstract

In recent years there has been much talk of a new abstraction. But what is new about this tendency? It is the thematic freedom and the overwhelming aesthetic bandwidth that characterizes these variations on the abstract. There are ultimately no dominant schools or -isms any more; choice is free, and free, what’s more, from the necessity to justify itself. Accordingly, self-centred abstraction plays almost no role any more, but rather the references to what Wassily Kandinsky called ‘Realistics’. In the exhibition ‘Straight Lines Always Lie’, then, the focus is on the thematic and formal interrelationship between Realism and Abstraction. There are, in equal measure, individual escapist tendencies just as there are continuations and transformations of historical references with varying frames of reference. The specific elements and inventions of historical abstract and realist production have become the pool on which the artists draw, using them effortlessly in the manner of sampling agents, who select, deconstruct, combine, celebrate or destroy, depending on individual preference and attitude. Today’s exponents of abstraction cannot be reduced to a common denominator; the variations cover a broad spectrum, not only aesthetically, but also thematically, ranging from historical references across architecturally inspired abstract fantasms, the processing of patterns and ornaments, experiments with material, light, and perception, ironic treatments and discursive questioning, all the way to subjectively based approaches. The crossing of genre boundaries is taken for granted, and provides additional new creative impetus.

This sort of creative thinking, in a kind of visual cycle, can be metaphorically explained by reference to a scene in Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’. The title of this exhibition, in German ‘Alles Gerade lügt’, is also taken from this dialogue. In the chapter ‘Face and Riddle’ Zarathustra says to the dwarf: “Stop. I! Or You!” The two are standing in front of a gateway, which has two ‘faces’, which Zarathustra explains thus: “Two paths come together here, which no one ever travelled to the end. Back along this long lane, that takes an eternity. And out along that long lane, that is a different eternity. They contradict each other, these paths, they bang their heads together, and here, at this gateway, they meet. The name of the gateway is written above it: ‘Moment’.” […] Zarathustra goes on to ask: “Do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?” – “Straight lines always lie”, murmurs the dwarf, “all truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.”

Reto Boller will show a sculpture and works on paper, Lothar Götz two new paintings and one of his early works of 1993, David Reed two of his studies, Gert & Uwe Tobias a coloured woodcuts and Pae White a tapestry.