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4 Leipzig Artists, 8 Positions

Leipzig has always been a city with a bustling local art scene. This was the case when the city was part of the GDR and it still is the case nearly two decades after the so-called New Leipzig School caught the attention of the international art circuit. When the term New Leipzig School emerged in the late 1990s, it was rejected by many of the Leipzig artists. But its rejection did not dissuade art dealers and artists in the West (and beyond) from using the term to label this exotic, desirable commodity emerging in the East. The New Leipzig School no longer needs anybody’s approval or judgement. It has moved passed its outdated label and its definition as a painting-only school. The Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst) is not only well and alive, but it has also been able to outgrow its earlier reputation by simultaneously holding on to its mission to support local artists without compromising its global reach and relevance.

My first stop in Leipzig was the Spinnerei. From the late nineteenth century on, the Spinnerei (as its German name suggests) developed into the largest cotton mill in Europe. It was only in the early 1990s, after Germany’s reunification, that the Spinnerei ceased to function as a factory and was progressively taken over by artists, artisans, and then galleries. In a city that is full of wonderful museums, galleries, artist studios, foundations and pop-ups, the Spinnerei has emerged as Leipzig’s most important art venue. This is largely due to the presence of several blue chip galleries, including Eigen + Art, and artist celebrities (on the local and international level such as Neo Rauch, Rosa Loy, Matthias Weischer, Tilo Baumgärtel and others), in addition to a couple of nonprofits like the archiv massiv, the Halle 14 art center and the international artist residency LIA.

Dorothée Louise Recker, Départ de Vert, 1 (Goutte d’or) and Départ de Noir, 2 (Ash): oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm, 2018

The newest addition to the Spinnerei is the gallery She BAM! . Its founder Laetitia Gorsy inaugurated the space this past September with the aim to “empower women in the Arts.” The first exhibition with Dorothée Louise Recker (in the main space) and Céline Germès (in the project space) has already set the tone for what we can expect from She Bam! in the future. Recker’s works on display are painted in two distinctive, yet related modes. On the one hand, she has installed and paired atmospheric color field paintings of various sizes. Her colors blend and transition from warm to cold, from green to orange, from pink to black. Her paintings radiate and draw the viewer in. The ever-changing color combinations simulate ebb and flow and suggest a boundless space devoid of concrete forms. From up close, it is refreshing to see that Recker did not use an airbrush or spray paint, but instead applied paint with a brush, moving horizontally across the surface to blend the various colors until they emulsify seamlessly.

Dorothée Louise Recker, En Négatif, 4, 200 x 250cm, work cloth, bleached and dyed, 2018

Other paintings in her show adopt a similar atmospheric sensibility. En Négatif,4 features bleached and dyed cloth with loose, less predictable marks and stains that sit atop an aquatic red-grey background. These paintings are filled with air, they are light, yet they do not lack substance or presence.

Installation view of Recker’s exhibition

The installation of Recker’s paintings is a work of art in itself and it draws strength from being understated, yet impactful. In several instances, she has painted some of the walls that her paintings are installed on. The paint on these walls, similar to her paintings, has been applied thinly. Her chosen hues are denser toward the gallery floor and turn evanescent once they approach the paintings from below, until they disappear altogether. The effect is one of condensation: evaporating paint that provides an adequate frame for the works on the walls. They no longer just radiate - now they also breathe.

Installation view of Céline Germès’ paintings in the project space

In the project space of the gallery, Germès’ small-scale paintings fill the walls with light, fire and smoke. Her meticulous surfaces reference their digital sources, mainly YouTube videos of riots, demonstrations, scenes of tension and violent eruptions. But they stand their own as paintings and they can only be considered in this way - as tangible, layered objects - precisely because they have been translated into paint. In a digital image, a smoldering fire turns cold the moment it is captured. In Germès’ paintings the same fire transforms into paint made of yellow, red, white and other hues. Her paint is mixed, applied and pushed across the surface to resemble an all-consuming force. In Germès’ paintings the representation of smoke - white and dense or fading and grey - indicates a convergence between paint and a physical phenomenon.

Céline Germès, Street #1, 21 x 32 cm, oil on canvas, 2016

This mastery of material appropriation sets Germès paintings apart from her sources so that the works do not turn into derivative paintings. These paintings acknowledge and emphasize the significance of their source. At the same time, Germès focuses exclusively on source material that demonstrates the reduced visibility of low-resolution footage. Because of her deficient source material, painting steps in as a powerful tool that renders the original image (or sequence of images in a video) less descriptive, more ambiguous and even poetic. It is here that Céline Germès paintings correspond closest to the painterly renditions of Vija Celmins. Both painters take a phenomenon like smoke and turn it into a reflection on seeing, thinking and painting.

Not far from the Spinnerei, approximately a 20 minute walk away, the Handelsschule (German: Trading School) is another hot spot for people working in the creative field. While the building in the back houses the Leipzig School of Design, the three-story building in the front contains artist studios of roughly two dozen artists, workshops, living quarters, and one exhibition space. In typical Leipzig fashion, the art on display ranged from eclectic to highly achieved, including illustrators, designers, photographers, painters, sculptors and one kayak repair shop.

Installation view of paintings on panel in Eva Kaiser’s studio. These paintings are based on her family (including two of her grandfathers in WW2 uniforms) and are part of a larger series called Memento from 2014.

Portraits are mostly on display in Eva Kaiser’s studio. They vary in their handling of color with some painted in shades of grey while others feature stronger contrasts and saturated flesh tones. The degree of resolution of faces and bodies differs as well. Some are schematic and sketched out, while other portraits are more resolved, yet never over-worked.

Installation view of paintings in Kaiser’s studio

(Top: V., 30 x 40 cm, oil on canvas, 2014 and Bottom: L., 30 x 30 cm, oil on canvas, 2014)

Two smaller portraits of women, depicting only their heads, are arranged above one another. Their colors are muted; not quite like in black and white photography, but instead they resemble the appearance of hand-colored photographs. Both sitters display an unnerving and captivating look, a glare of sorts - hard to discern and even harder to confront. In conversation, Kaiser discloses that the women in the paintings are German concentration camp guards (Elisabeth Volkenrath and Hilde Lohbauer) during WW2. Her disclosure about the women’s identity is not a preposterous attempt at making “meaningful” painting. These paintings are not cynical or overambitious. Instead their contemporary looks and slight coloration carries them from the past into the present as if to say: we never left, we have never disappeared; that which made us witnesses and accomplices is still with us and it exists within us all.

In light of recent events of far-right agitators hunting down every non-white person in sight and attacking journalists in Chemnitz (or, to use an American equivalent: Charlottesville, VA last year), Kaiser’s paintings cast a warning. Her subjects’ serenity is misleading. Kaiser’s decision to pick female protagonists is a conscious decision. She hopes that her viewers will be unable to identify her subjects as perpetrators of mass murder; a realization that is further complicated by the roles we traditionally expect women to fulfill.

Theresa Möller, Landschaft, 190 x 250 cm, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2018

In Theresa Möller’s studio at the Handelsschule, one painting draws attention away from her other works on display. Partly, this is due to its impressive scale of 75” x 98”. In a general sense, Möller’s most recent works are landscape paintings. The painting in question, simply titled Landschaft (Landscape), is aligned horizontally with a thin sliver of grey separating the “sky” from the “ground”.

Möller’s painting differs from the landscapes of many other painters in the way she employs and tests out a multitude of textures in Landschaft. The horizontal lines and segments that structure her canvas (sometimes more visible, sometimes less so) lend the painting its footing and anchor. Aside from this structuring device, every area in her painting competes with one another, eating and flowing into its neighboring regions and thereby charging the entire work with activity. Even when we start discovering the painting’s many parts and their varied treatment (drips vs. solids, stains vs. shapes, layered vs. wiped), we never lose sight of the whole and its reference to landscape. At the same time, what would become of her painting if the “sky” just disappeared or bled into the rest of the painting? Perhaps Möller wants to uphold this monochromatic element to maintain the illusion of space and with it the belief that the difference between abstraction and figuration is marginal at best.

In the end, the most exciting aspect about these four artists is how their stance toward painting does not add up to four distinct positions. They occupy at least eight positions. Dorothée Louise Recker’s repertoire easily covers abstract and figurative painting (she calls the latter “Figurations”) as well as video. Céline Germès successfully transitions from paintings of fragmented video footage, to photography and back to painting. Both Theresa Möller and Eva Kaiser continue to work through multiple modes of representation by employing the traditional tropes of landscape and portraiture respectively.

One of the most limiting words used to describe a body of work is “uneven.” Detecting unevenness in an artist’s work can be warranted. But to use it as a negative qualifier can be harmful. It can be harmful to the context of an artist’s work and ambition. The presence of “unevenness” does not automatically imply a lack of artistic vision or a lack of discipline. To deny artists “unevenness” is to deny them experimentation. To praise an artist’s “evenness” is to praise the development of a brand or signature style. And the beneficiary of an enduring signature style is an art market that can only turn a profit if it can deliver predictable results.

As these four artists demonstrate, the way forward is to acknowledge that painting is not defined by limitations, but by possibilities. And some of these opportunities demand that we become more curious as artists. They demand that we be aware of our histories, our socio-political conditions, our current times, and the world at large. We will achieve to diversify our practice only if we look for art beyond our studio. Lastly, we need to lose fear of failure. And once we are no longer afraid, we might also stop paying attention to who follows or un-follows us on Instagram.