pdf - Greengrassi

V O R A L L E R
A U G E N
Amy Sherlock
Ellen Gronemeyers humorvolle Malerei zwischen
Sehen und Gesehenwerden
Ellen Gronemeyer’s paintings gauge the distance
between seeing and being seen
1
Was soll’s, 2012
Oil on canvas
100 × 80 cm
All images courtesy: the artist, greengrassi, London & Kimmerich, Berlin, except where stated
T H E E Y E S
H A V E I T
ELLEN GRONEMEYER
2
Jetzt, 2007
Oil on canvas
40 × 50 cm
3
Zitronengelbe Rötlinge, 2013
Oil on canvas
70 × 90 cm
an der Wand betrachten. Fenster waren für
eine Zeit ein wiederkehrendes Motiv, ebenso
Schlüssellöcher, etwa in jenem Hidden Door
(2007–09; 2008) betitelten Werkpaar, das
2009 in einer Ausstellung mit kleinformatigen Porträts der Künstlerin bei greengrassi
in London zu sehen war. Wohin führt eine
verborgene Tür? Will man das wirklich
wissen? Man steht draußen, drückt sein Auge
an das Schlüsselloch und schaut hinein.
Aber will man deswegen gleich eintreten,
sollte die Tür doch aufgehen? Die elegante
Protagonistin von Jetzt schaut mit einem
Blick auf ein Gemälde an der Wand, als wolle
sie in es hineinflüchten. Der Galerieraum
ist – vielleicht stellvertretend für die Kunstwelt insgesamt – eine unklar definierte Zone
der Exklusion, bei der der Wunsch „in“ zu
sein stets durch gegenläufige Fluchtfantasien
ausgeglichen wird. Wer weiß, womöglich
handelt es sich bei den im Mondlicht aufscheinenden Kanten der herabgelassenen
Jalousien auf dem düsteren Gemälde Billion
Blinds (2007) ja eher um die Gitterstäbe
eines Käfigs.
In neueren Arbeiten – wie sie beispielsweise in der Ausstellung Watchever zu sehen
waren – wird der ängstliche Blick nach
innen, wie man ihn noch auf Jetzt findet, von
einem Blick nach außen abgelöst. Wo zuvor
geschlossene Räume dominierten, gibt es
jetzt Scharen offener Augen. Die architektonisch erzeugte Tiefenillusion der älteren
Arbeiten fällt in sich zusammen. Stattdessen
ist alles nun nach vorne an die Bildoberfläche gerückt und sucht sich seinen Platz im
dicht gedrängten Geviert des Bildes. Bei
2
The first things you notice about Ellen
Gronemeyer are her eyes. They are enormous,
open expectantly, giving the painter an
air of childlike inquisitiveness. I wouldn’t
normally preface a piece with this kind of
Sunday-supplement detail, but they say that
the eyes can’t hide anything, and, when we
meet at Gronemeyer’s Berlin studio the connection between the artist’s own eyes and
the cartoon-googly ones that cover her recent
canvases becomes glaringly obvious.
to be here, just her and I, four eyes between
us, being watched from all angles. Studio
visits are an opportunity for observation,
but it’s usually me who’s doing the looking.
Where did they come from, these staring
eyes? Gronemeyer has often used looking
as a gauge of distance, a way of measuring
separation between spaces. Producing outsides and insides the artist hints at attendant
notions of community and isolation, and the
power dynamics of withins and withouts.
den Arbeiten in Watchever kann man kaum
von Figuren sprechen, derart elementar
und allgemein sind die Gesichter wiedergegeben: eine runde Nase, ein offener Mund,
ein Paar Kulleraugen. So widersetzen sich
diese Gemälde in ihrer Flachheit auch dem
Narrativen. Auf Bubbletea (2013) beispielsweise will man gierig alles auf einmal lesen –
und verliert sich dabei in einem Geflecht
aus weißen Mickey-Mouse-Händen und
Clownsnasen, die über der liegenden (ihrerseits aus einem Cartoon zu stammen
scheinenden) Hauptfigur herumschwirren.
In Lobster Heaven (2012) quellen aus einem
Hintergrund aus bunt zusammengewürfelten, orange-rot gekochten Hummerschalen
Hunderte von einzelnen Augen hervor.
Wenn es Geschichten gibt in diesen Gemälden, dann werden sie von den Farben erzählt,
die hier und da unter der trüben Oberfläche
des Bildes hervorblitzen – vergrabene
Schichten, auf denen sich frühere Formen
erhalten haben, das motorische Gedächtnis
eines jeden einzelnen Bildes.
Pop Up Your Eis (2009) markiert einen
Wendepunkt im Übergang von der stillschweigenden Isoliertheit der frühen Porträts zur Kakophonie der späteren Werke.
Auf diesem kleinformatigen Bild formt
ein Berg von pastellfarbenen Eiscremekugeln
einen unförmig aufgedunsenen Kopf.
Zwei schwarz ausgesparte Kugeln werden
durch konzentrische Kreise zu Augen.
Sie wirken irgendwie gestört, leicht irre
und überzuckert. Ist das eine Warnung vor
dem Suchtpotenzial bestimmter süßlicher
Illustration à la Walt Disney? Vielleicht.
In recent works, swarms of open eyes
have replaced closed spaces, and the illusion of depth,
architectonically inferred in earlier
canvases, collapses.
Eyes are everywhere. The studio is filled
with canvases of different sizes and in various states of completion from which highly
stylized, ping pong ball-like ocular spheres
stare out. In some cases they are grouped
with other exaggerated, semi-comic features
to form a face, but often they float free,
independent of one another, expressions
of pure looking and being looked at. They
surface like tadpoles in a boggy pool from
thickly impastoed accumulations of oil paint.
Swathes of background colour are muddied
by the dense layers of black and white which
the artist uses to paint forms out and back
in again – repetitively and almost compulsively until the brush strokes look more like
chisel marks. Gronemeyer’s sculpted surfaces
take a long time to build up; she can sometimes be working on a canvas for over a year.
Some pieces in the studio are just back from
her 2014 exhibition, Watchever, at Ludwig
Forum Aachen; several others are still being
worked on. It’s odd and slightly uncanny
104
A group of works exhibited at Andrew Kreps,
New York, in 2007, depicting the closed
interiors of salons and galleries, seems to
focus mostly on peering in. Works like Jetzt
(Now, 2007) and Präsenz verstecken (Conceal
Presence, 2007) show porcelain-featured
onlookers studying paintings (or could they
be mirrors?) that hang from the walls. For a
time windows were a recurring motif, as were
keyholes, as in a pair of works titled Hidden
Door (2007–09; 2008) which were slipped in
amongst the small-scale portraits that comprised the artist’s 2009 show at greengrassi
in London. Where does a hidden door lead,
and do we really want to find out? If you are
pressing your eye to a keyhole, you are probably on the outside looking in. Then again,
maybe the door is already open and you just
don’t want to step through. The elegant
protagonist of Jetzt looks at the painting on
the wall as if she half wants to escape into
it. The gallery space in these works – perhaps
shorthand for the art world itself – is an
F R I E Z E d /e N O . 1 7
DEZEMBER 2014 – FEBRUAR 2015
2 courtesy: the artist and Andrew Kreps, New York
Eigentlich beginne ich Texte über das Werk
eines Künstlers oder einer Künstlerin nicht
mit Details zur Person. Aber an der Malerin
Ellen Gronemeyer fallen mir einfach als erstes
ihre Augen auf. Riesig und erwartungsvoll
geöffnet, geben sie ihr die Anmutung kindlicher Wissbegierde. Es heißt, Augen könnten nichts verbergen, und beim Treffen
in Gronemeyers Dachgeschoss-Atelier in
Berlin war die Verbindung zwischen ihrem
eigenen Aussehen und den cartoonesken
Kulleraugen ihrer jüngeren Bilder einfach
nicht zu übersehen.
Überall sind also Augen. Das Atelier ist
voll mit Leinwänden in unterschiedlichen
Formaten und verschiedenen Fertigungsstadien, von denen stark stilisierte tischtennisballartige Augäpfel glotzen. Manchmal
sind sie mit anderen, beinahe comic-artig
überzeichneten Gesichtspartien kombiniert,
meist aber treiben sie frei und unabhängig
voneinander auf der Fläche, sind bloßer
Ausdruck des Sehens und Gesehenwerdens.
Aus pastosen Ansammlungen von Ölfarbe
tauchen sie auf wie Kaulquappen aus einem
trüben Tümpel. Teile der Hintergrundfarbe
verschlammen in den dicken Schwarz- und
Weißschichten, mit denen die Künstlerin
Formen heraus- und wieder hineinmalt –
repetitiv, fast zwanghaft –, bis die Pinselstriche wie gemeißelt wirken. Gronemeyer
braucht lange, um ihre skulpturalen Oberflächen aufzubauen; manchmal arbeitet
sie mehr als ein Jahr an einer einzigen Leinwand. Einige der Gemälde in ihrem Atelier
sind gerade von ihrer Ausstellung Watchever
zurückgekommen, die im Frühsommer
2014 im Ludwig Forum Aachen zu sehen
war; andere sind noch in Arbeit. Hier zu
sein fühlt sich schon etwas seltsam und
unheimlich an – unter vier Augen mit einer
Künstlerin, aber dennoch angeblickt von
allen Seiten. Sicher, Atelierbesuche bieten
Gelegenheit für Beobachtungen. Aber
normalerweise bin ich es, die für das Schauen
zuständig ist.
Wo aber kommen sie alle her, diese starrenden Augen? Früher setzte Gronemeyer
Blicke ein, um Distanz auszuloten, als Maß
für den Grad des Getrenntseins von Räumen,
um ein Innen und ein Außen zu erzeugen
oder auf das Zusammenspiel von Gemeinschaft und Isolation ebenso zu verweisen wie
auf die Machtspiele von Ein- und Ausschluss.
In einer Werkgruppe, die sie 2007 in New
York bei Andrew Kreps gezeigt hatte und die
geschlossene Innenräume von Salons und
Galerien zeigt, scheint es vorwiegend um das
Hineinluken zu gehen. Auf Arbeiten wie
Jetzt (2007) oder Präsenz verstecken (2007)
sind porzellangesichtige Menschen zu sehen,
die Gemälde (oder vielleicht eher Spiegel?)
ELLEN GRONEMEYER
3
F R I E Z E d /e N O . 1 7
DECEMBER 2014 – FEBRUARY 2015
105
ambiguous zone of exclusion, where the
desire to be ‘in’ is always tempered by an
opposing fantasy of escape. Maybe, in fact,
the moonlight-gilded edges of the drawn
Billion Blinds in a shadowy painting from
2007 are the bars of a cage.
In more recent works, however, such
as those shown in her show Watchever,
the anxious introspection of Jetzt has been
reversed. Swarms of open eyes have replaced
closed spaces, and the illusion of depth,
architectonically inferred in earlier canvases,
collapses. Everything is pushed to the surface, jostling for space in the same cramped
pictorial frame. It’s hard to talk about
individual characters in the Watchever works
because faces have been distilled to their
most basic, generalized form of notation:
a rounded nose, an open mouth, a pair of
goggle-eyes. Similarly, the paintings’ flatness
resists narrative because the viewer’s
eye reads everything all at once, frantically,
getting lost in the haze of white Mickey
Mouse hands and bulbous comedy noses
swirling above the reclining figure, himself
cartoon-generic, in the extraordinary 2013
work, Bubbletea. In Lobster Heaven (2012),
the titular crustaceans appear to have been
smushed up, visible in the background as
the orange-red of their cooked carapaces,
from which bulge hundreds of disembodied
eyes. If there are stories in these paintings,
they are told by the flashes of colour that are
occasionally visible beneath the canvases’
muddied surface – buried layers, which hold
earlier forms, like the muscle memory of
each work’s own long history.
ELLEN GRONEMEYER
Wie bei vielen ihrer Werke hat der Titel
Pop Up Your Eis etwas Kalauerhaftes – ein
Wortspiel mit eyes/Eis und popsicle/ice-pop
(Eis am Stiel). Mit der im Englischen grammatisch schrägen Formulierung mag der Witz
aber nicht so richtig zünden. Ganz bewusst.
Titel wie Wait Watchers (2014) sind ungefähr
so lustig wie die Witze meines Vaters. Es
geht hier ganz klar um beknackte, absichtlich
platte Parodien auf eine bestimmte Sorte
Humor – und zielt damit eher auf Augenrollen ab denn auf echte Lacher.
ELLEN GRONEMEYER
sagte den Teilnehmern, sie sollten
„so dämlich lächeln wie irgend möglich“
und sich vorstellen, sie seien komplette
Idioten. Für die eigenen verräterischen
Ausdrucksweisen nicht mehr verantwortlich
zu sein und der Notwendigkeit einer
Entsprechung von äußerer Erscheinung und
psychologischer Wirklichkeit zu entsagen,
empfand Gronemeyer, so erzählte sie mir,
als außerordentlich befreiend.
Gronemeyer treibt ein Spiel mit der
Blödheit – und das ist etwas ganz anderes,
Es geht in Gronemeyers Malerei ganz klar um
eine beknackte, absichtlich platte Parodie von Humor –
mehr um Augenrollen denn um echte Lacher.
Humor ist wichtig in diesem Werk,
besonders die Dämlichkeit der Witze. Aber
eben auch die Frage, was ein Lächeln bedeuten, was es verbergen könnte. (In Arbeiten
wie Comme Ci Comme Ça oder Tunnelblick,
beide 2012, sind Münder sehr präsent,
wenn auch nicht ganz so bestimmend wie die
Augen). In ihrem Atelier erzählt Gronemeyer
davon, wie sie vor einigen Jahren versuchte,
Ballett zu lernen. Eines Nachmittags ging
sie mit einer befreundeten Tänzerin mit, die
in einem fortgeschritteneren Kurs tanzte.
Gronemeyer machte mit, obwohl das Niveau
dort weit über ihren Möglichkeiten lag und
sie die Schritte nicht kannte. Eines blieb
ihr aus dieser Klasse hängen: Die Tanzlehrerin
als sich dumm zu stellen. Wer sich dumm
stellt, verstellt sich; dagegen präsentiert
sich Blödheit als vollkommene Offenheit, als
Unfähigkeit, irgendetwas zu verbergen.
Blödheit reagiert stets auf ewige Gegenwart:
Sie kümmert sich nicht um die Zukunft
und hält sich nicht mit der Vergangenheit
auf (und lernt nichts aus ihr – eines der
Wesensmerkmale der Blödheit). Wenn
Comicfiguren, denen Gronemeyers Gestalten
immer mehr gleichen, blöd erscheinen,
dann, weil ihre Existenz darauf beschränkt
ist, bloßer Ausdruck, reiner Gestus zu sein.
Durch ihre Linearität entledigt die Karikatur
die Bildgegenstände der Dramatik eigenständiger psychologischer Existenz.
Pop Up Your Eis (2009) marks a key
moment in the transition from the taciturn
insularity of early portraits to the cacophonous later works. In this small portrait,
pastel coloured ice-cream scoop boules
are stacked to form a swollen, misshapen
head. Two blacked-out spheres are filled
with concentric circles to create eyes that look
deranged, as if on some crazed sugar high –
a warning, perhaps, about the dangers and
addictiveness of a certain Walt Disney-esque
strand of saccharine illustration. As with
the titles of many of Gronemeyer’s works,
Pop Up Your Eis is a semi-pun – playing on
eyes/Eis and the popsicle/ice-pop – which
deliberately doesn’t quite come off because
of a certain grammatical awkwardness
in English. Titles like Wait Watchers (2014)
are funny in the way that my dad’s jokes are
funny: silly parodies of witticism, knowingly
flat-footed, playing for the eye rolls rather
than laughs.
Humour – of a specifically daft kind
– is important, as is the question of what a
smile might mean, or what it might conceal.
(Mouths, though not quite as prevalent as
eyes, feature heavily in works like Comme
Ci Comme Ça and Tunnelblick, both 2012).
In the studio, Gronemeyer tells me an
anecdote from a few years back, when she
was trying out ballet as a new hobby. One
afternoon she went along with a performer
friend who was in a more advanced class.
Gronemeyer joined in though it was far
beyond her level. She didn’t know the steps,
but something stuck with her: the teacher
telling the dancers to ‘grin as stupidly as
possible’, to imagine they were totally idiotic.
To be relieved of the tell-tale responsibility
of her own expressions, to abdicate the
Der Protagonist von Bubbletea schläft
mit weit geöffneten Augen, das pastellige
Konfetti über ihm scheint anzuzeigen,
dass sein Geist ebenso leer ist wie ein
verrauschtes Fernsehbild.
Viele der augähnlichen „Blasen“ in
Bubbletea sind von unglaublicher Rundheit
und zeugen von Gronemeyers malerischer
Meisterschaft. Annähernd perfekte Kreise
zu malen, ist alles andere als einfach: In
einer berühmten Anekdote wird berichtet,
wie Giotto, als er aufgefordert wurde, dem
päpstlichen Hof Benedikts IX. eine Probe
seiner Kunstfertigkeit zu liefern, dem Boten
einen Kreis mitgab, den er mit dem Stift in
einem Zug aus dem Handgelenk gezeichnet
hatte. Giotto bekam den Auftrag. Aus dieser
Geschichte entwickelte sich aber auch eine
toskanische Redensart, die zu erkennen gibt,
dass klug und kugelrund ein eher ambivalentes Verhältnis unterhalten: Wenn einer
„rund wie Giottos O“ ist, meint das etwa
das Gleiche wie der englische Ausdruck „as
thick as a brick“, also dumm wie Stroh.
Vielleicht stellt sich Gronemeyer am
Ende aber auch wirklich dumm. Ihre schlichten Gesichter lassen komplexe Themen
anklingen – Fragen nach dem Ich und der
Gemeinschaft, danach, was es heißt, in
unserer durch und durch vernetzten, massenüberwachten Gesellschaft beobachtet zu
werden und beobachtbar zu sein. Sich
dumm stellen ist eine Möglichkeit, die Aufmerksamkeit abzulenken, etwas vor den
spähenden Blicken versteckt zu halten, wenn
man zunehmend das Gefühl hat, dass alles
zur Schau gestellt wird und werden muss.
Watchever ist geprägt von einer uralten,
gerade heute akuten Paranoia – wischt diese
Paranoia aber mit wortspielerischer Leichtigkeit sofort wieder vom Tisch: „Watched /
ever? Whatever!“ (Beobachtet / immer?
Wie auch immer!) Letztlich hat es ja auch
etwas Beruhigendes, in der Menge zu verschwinden. Vielleicht findet sich darin,
ein Augenpaar unter vielen zu sein, eine
besondere Form des Entwischens. Hat man
es bei der rastlosen Energie, die man in
Gronemeyers jüngsten Werken zu spüren
vermeint, mit einer Art ansteckender Partylaune zu tun oder mit der albtraumhaften
Vorstellung, immer etwas leisten zu müssen,
in der Arbeit wie im Leben? Vielleicht ist
es ja beides: ein – nicht nur widerwillig
gemachtes – Eingeständnis, dass es nicht möglich ist, jemals in Ruhe gelassen zu werden.
Übersetzt von Michael Müller
Amy Sherlock ist Reviews Editor bei frieze.
Sie lebt in London.
4
Untitled
2012, oil and pen on paper
30 × 42 cm
5
Lobster Heaven
2013, oil on canvas
100 × 80 cm
4
106
F R I E Z E d /e N O . 1 7
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F R I E Z E d /e N O . 1 7
DECEMBER 2014 – FEBRUARY 2015
5
need for the correspondence between outer
appearance and psychological reality, was,
Gronemeyer found, totally liberating.
Gronemeyer plays with dumbness,
which is not the same as playing dumb.
To play dumb is to dissimulate; by contrast,
dumbness presents itself as a total openness
– the inability to hide. Dumbness responds
to a perpetual present: not projecting towards
the future, nor dwelling on the past (or learning from it). If cartoon characters – which
Gronemeyer’s figures have increasingly
come to resemble – seem dumb, it is because
they exist as pure expression and gesture.
The graphic line of caricature has liberated her
subjects from the dramas of their own psychologies. The protagonist in Bubbletea, for
instance, is sleeping with his eyes wide open,
the pastel-hued confetti above him seeming
to indicate the TV-static blankness of his mind.
Many of the ocular ‘bubbles’ in
Bubbletea are improbably round, attesting to
Gronemeyer’s skill as a painter. Being able
to produce near-perfect circles is no laughing
matter: in the famous tale, Giotto, summoned to send a proof of his artistic ability to
the papal court of Benedict IX, dispatches
the messenger with a perfectly-formed pencil
circle drawn with a single flick of the wrist.
He gets the commission. This story, however,
also gives rise to a Tuscan proverb that
107
reflects the ambivalent relationship between
the smart and the spherical: in Italian, to be
‘round as Giotto’s O’ is to be, as English
expresses it in similarly blunt terms: ‘as thick
as a brick’.
Maybe Gronemeyer is playing dumb,
after all. Her simple faces hide complex
themes – about self and community, and
what it is to be observed and observable in
our hyper-networked, mass-surveilled
society. Playing dumb is a way of deflecting
attention, keeping something away from
prying eyes when you feel increasingly that
everything is and must be on display. The
term ‘watchever’ is tinged by an age-old
paranoia made contemporarily acute, but it
also brushes this off with paronomastic
levity: ‘Watched / ever? Whatever!’ There is,
after all, something reassuring about being
in a crowd. Perhaps being one pair of eyes
among many is its own form of escape. Is
the frantic energy felt in Gronemeyer’s recent
works the same kind of buzz that you get
from a party, or is it closer to the anxietydream of constantly having to perform,
in work and in life? Maybe it’s a bit of both:
a concession, made not entirely resentfully,
to the impossibility of ever being left alone.
Amy Sherlock is reviews editor of frieze.
She lives in London.
Bayliss, Simon, Painting Highlights from Frieze Art Fair 2012, The Painting Imperative,
#6, London, October 2012.
Critic’s Choice: Painting Highlights from Frieze Art Fair 2012
By Simon Bayliss
Ellen Gronemeyer: Ratatouille, 2012. Oil on Canvas board.
122 x 150 cm | 48 x 59 inches
Courtesy the artist / Kimmerich Gallery, New York
Also irreverent at first glance, yet exhaustively worked are the paintings of
Berlin-based painter Ellen Gronemeyer shown at Kimmerich, New York. But the
evidently intense relationship the artist has with her paintings offsets any
suspicions of irony or calculated distance suggested by the apparent doodling
of her childlike motifs. Ratatouille, as the title suggests, is a rich and colourful
stew, not of al dente Mediterranean vegetables however, but an overcooked
crock of thick amalgamating paint encrusted within which balloon-like boggleeyed faces appear to have slowly bubbled to the surface. The caricatures melt
into one another – some seem to be attempting to interact – but all peer intently
in individual directions.
I do not wish to question the artist’s sanity, but Gronemeyer’s paintings
immediately reminded me of the atmosphere of work from the Prinzhorn
Collection, made by patients from psychiatric hospitals. This is partly due to her
emphasis on a multitude of searching eyes, but it is also the uninhibited and
uncompromising slowness of her peculiar pictures; the psychic build-up of these
seemingly subconscious and bizarre outbursts. For me there is overwhelming
sense of integrity in these playful, deep-dish renderings. When viewed in the
high art context of Frieze, they appear irreverently unclever and staunchly
obtuse, but despite this I would bet that they contain more psychological mettle
than half of the fair’s work put together.
The paintings are woven from small obsessive brush-marks, reminiscent of the
caked edges of a painter’s pallet; where colours build-up by random application
layer upon layer. Gronemeyer’s colours don’t conform to our conditioned
aesthetic sense; they appear openly muddled, as do her shapes and motifs. The
awkwardness of her ideas seems to emerge through the alchemy of painting
itself. For me her output gives the impression of a painter once persistently
scorned by her art teachers; an ugly duckling so obsessed with painting that
through a persistent and rebellious belief in her dubious practice the work has
become brilliantly sophisticated and fascinating to behold.
!
Schultz, Charles, Ellen Gronemeyer Affentheater, The Brooklyn Rail, NYC, Oct 2012.
ELLEN GRONEMEYER Affentheater
by Charles Schultz
KIMMERICH GALLERY | SEPTEMBER 7 – OCTOBER 20, 2012
What is to be done when one generation’s entertainment becomes the next
generation’s disparagement? Does one laugh, cringe, or contemplate? If we
can draw any conclusions from the paintings of Ellen Gronemeyer, whose
work engages this very question, then it would seem all three reactions are
equally valid. Her current exhibition, Affentheater, which translates as “Ape
Theater,” refers to the cadres of chimps that would impersonate humans in
various comedic sketches on stage. Apparently quite popular during its
heyday, the pastime evolved into an idiomatic expression in the German
language for situations that are generally noisy and chaotic, as well as any
behavior that appears exaggerated and ridiculous.
Ellen Gronemeyer, “Gambling Caviar,” 2012. Oil on canvas. 37.4 ! 45”.
Image courtesy Kimmerich, New York, NY. Photo: Thomas Müller.
Gronemeyer’s paintings convey the psychology of the phrase exquisitely.
They are not pretty, but attractive in the manner of things that have fully
embraced and embodied their monstrousness. They seem honest and
unrestrained, like a bunch of drunks telling you what they really think.
Except there is far more nuance in what these paintings have to impart than
in any drunken rant I’ve heard.
The subject matter of Gronemeyer’s paintings is consistently grotesque.
Cartoony figures with generic facial features are portrayed in states of bliss so
ecstatic their eyes bulge and their toothy grins look stretched to the point of
snapping off their heads. “Funkuchen” (2012) exemplifies the deranged
horror of such happiness; it looks the way amphetamines feel when one
doubles up on the recommended dosage. “Funkuchen” is organized around a
central sun-like head, complete with radial flare and a madman’s smile. The
sun’s popping eyes are themselves turned into heads whose own eyes are
popping. And above the left eye, in the forehead space, there appears to be a
skydiver plummeting headfirst. The diver’s eyes, somewhat predictably, are
so large they look swollen. In Gronemeyer’s world, terror and rapture are
nearly indistinguishable.
Ellen Gronemeyer, “Funkuchen,” 2012. Oil on canvas. 23.6 ! 31.5”.
Image courtesy Kimmerich, New York, NY.Photo: Thomas Müller.
There is no pictorial depth in Gronemeyer’s scenes; everything presses
together on the surface of the canvas amassing into an incredible visual
density. Bodies come apart in the scrum; heads float amidst heads; arms and
legs don’t necessarily attach to torsos. In paintings such as “Find ich spitze”
(2012), the whole scene softens into a kind of soupy obscurity of energetic
brushwork that only occasionally resolves into identifiable figures. Paintings
such as this one drive home the bifurcating principle in Gronemeyer’s
technique: The figurative component disintegrates into line and form,
approaching the non-space of total abstraction, though not fully arriving
there.
Physically, Gronemeyer’s canvases tend to sag a bit under the weight of her
paint. Like Lucian Freud, she builds her surface up with so many layers of oil
that the pictures get all knobby. Unlike the late Englishman, Gronemeyer’s
strength is not in her sense of color, but in the gestural heft of her paint
handling. Every work has its own topography, complete with countless ridges
and ravines, some deep enough to cast their own shadows. Whatever flippant
ridiculousness her pictures may convey pictorially is held in check by the
sense of persistence and patience evident in the slow accumulation of
pigment on the picture plane.
Of 19 works on view, “Gambling Caviar” (2012) stands out as a particularly
fine composition. Here the color is keyed down low and the scene is stuffed
with heads and eyes, as if the viewer were looking out at a tightly packed
crowd in some smoky dance hall. “Gambling Caviar” has a clear precedent in
the pictures of James Ensor, perhaps most specifically his “Self-Portrait with
Masks” (1899) in which faces are similarly detached from bodies, given
garish expression, and presented on a flat vertical plane. Of course, Ensor
was painting masks, but cartoons aren’t so different: both maintain just
enough realism to make their farcical nature enjoyably absurd. For
Gronemeyer’s paintings this turns out to be a quintessential distinction.
Without that element of recognition her paintings would pass completely
into the realm of abstraction. That may happen in the future, but for now
they are doing well pivoting on the threshold.
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Ellen Gronemeyer @ greengrassi, www.isendyouthis.com, London, June 2012.
Ellen Gronemeyer
Greengrassi
6/21/2012 to 7/28/2012
Tuesday–Saturday, 11am–6pm
Ellen Gronemeyer's works depict figures inhabiting exhibition spaces, complete with
paintings hung on walls and a glass of sparkling wine. The works show invented spaces, but
also reflect on the viewer's concurrent experience in the real gallery, outside of the pictorial
space. Some of the works are more abstract, which Gronemeyer sees as paintings of paintings
that could appear in the imagined galleries shown in her other works. Gronemeyer's small
canvases are repeatedly layered with paint; first colorful layers, followed by darker layers,
giving them an ambiguous, somber tone with hints of a colorful glow from beneath.
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Asthoff, Jens, Ellen Gronemeyer, Artforum, NYC, Summer 2011, pp.421-422.
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Asthoff, Jens, Ellen Gronemeyer, Artforum, New York, June 1, 2009.
Ellen Gronemeyer
05.07.09-06.16.09 greengrassi
On entering Ellen Gronemeyer’s exhibition, visitors are greeted by the head of a character
with a broad grin: It Was Not Me, 2008–2009, serves as an appropriate point of departure for
the range of fictional portraits that, in different ways, evoke the grotesque and caricature. This
selection of recent pieces is the culmination of all Gronemeyer’s previous work in that its
appeal lies in its aesthetically recalcitrant nature. The cast of this whimsical world of images
consists of ecstatic visages (Crossing the Line, 2009), cat-women (It Took the Night to
Believe It, 2007–2008), kids wearing glasses (Out of One’s Head, 2009), and almost faceless
forms (Withdrawal, 2008). Though the representations are singular, they are not
personalized; they are more types than individuals. In these images, Gronemeyer marries
comic distortion to an experimental use of basic pictorial formulas. For example, overlapping
circular forms become a multifocal face in A Hundred Times in Any Direction, 2008–2009,
and a delicately painted portrait of a woman in I Don’t Know Why, 2008–2009. The latter is
overlaid with the schematic outline of a keyhole and a bulbous-nosed Kilroy figure, while the
intensely formalized structure of the work mainly proceeds from the surface. Gronemeyer
combines the contouring of the figures in her recent pieces with a grisaillelike surface, which
is extremely dense and superbly structured. Thus, the overall impression of many of her
paintings is reduced, while a closer glimpse of her paintings’ “skin,” so to speak, reveals great
complexity––there is not a single inch that has not been worked over again and again. This is
particularly true of the smaller paintings, such as It Took the Night and Tipsy Cat, 2007–2009,
which can be seen either as a mythical figure or as an almost abstract composition. Its harsh
contouring gives rise to subtle aspects: The dense mass of color, almost all of which appears
to have been finely spackled on, forms a pale gray layer that seems to be illuminated from the
inside by numerous shades of blue, red, and yellow that, together, tend toward white––a cool
colorfulness that is typical of Gronemeyer’s painting.
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ELLEN GRONEMEYER and MICHAEL HAKIMI
Andrew Kreps Gallery
525 West 22nd Street, Chelsea
Through July 20
Andrew Kreps has a healthy eye for the unobvious: art that stands back a little,
takes time to get to know. The work in this two-person show is a good example of
that dynamic.
Ellen Gronemeyer’s smallish paintings have a scratchy, built-up look, as if layers
of color had been alternated with layers of black, or color had been etched into
black. Her images of salonlike rooms furnished with pictures, or of cartoony
heads or objects, seem to be viewed through static or from an obscuring distance.
The colors stay rich, even when covered up. The results are a little like Vuillard’s
homely Symbolist interiors, or Louise Fishman’s striated abstract paintings of the
1970s, full of locked-up light.
Michael Hakimi’s work on paper has, by contrast, no surface to speak of. It’s flat,
matte, air-brushed. If Ms. Gronemeyer’s painting is about tunneling into
architectural space, Mr. Hakimi’s is about seeing architecture from the outside.
One piece in the show is a cut-out of what could be an urban skyline, but hung
upside down and toasted around the edges with dark spray paint: it’s like a
reflection of a damaged city, but a reflection you might wear like a cape.
Other pieces look like aerial views of highly abstract elevations: circles and
squares connected by unexplained wires, everything liquid and floating. I was
reminded of Ricci Albenda’s wonderful, illusionistic installation of animated
architecture at the gallery earlier in the season. At first you had to give yourself
reasons to look at it; nothing seemed to be happening. Then you saw that the
space you were in was soundlessly moving. HOLLAND COTTER
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Asthoff, Jens, Ellen Gronemeyer, Artforum, New York, November 11, 2005.
Ellen Gronemeyer
11.01.05-01.14.06 Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg
Ellen Gronemeyer's images are usually small and somber, yet full of crystalline colors. Her
“paste-like” paintings appear strangely compressed: stories seem jammed together and
moods waft in and out, with nothing becoming more than a suggestion. A sallow radiance, a
kind of cold fire, glows in these nighttime landscapes. One can see an eternal (and at times
mythical) nature occasionally populated by human forms. Often these figures are faceless—
not individuals, but placeholders for the imaginary. Though they grow out of the colored space
around them, they seem curiously isolated; in Der Schwarzweiß-Freund verneint Sicht [The
Black-and-White Friend Denies Vision], 2005, nature is a closed-off terrain. These figures
embody the same sense of alienation emanated by their surroundings. Gronemeyer uses
painterly conventions discreetly—placing specific colors around a particular gray to leaven its
darkness, for example—to create surreal suspense. Some images allude to the past:
contoured, transparent coloring evokes Chagall, while the Fauve-like creation of colorfulness
from a dominant black recalls Georges Rouault. This is less a direct comparison than a
palpable affinity. While atmospheric, Gronemeyer's canvases address the larger question of
man's connection with nature.
Translated from the German by Jane Brodie.
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