GiG air – Stefanie Ullmann

Another studio visit and resulting exhibition text:

I owe you the truth in painting and I will give it to you

Cézanne

…d’un seul pas franchi…

Derrida

The small problem of truth has been occupying me recently: the truth in painting, as promised by another “sauvage raffiné,” Paul Cézanne. A long time ago, it took a painting by Vincent van Gogh, Old Shoes with Laces (1886), for the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to recognise what this truth might be and for him, the artwork became defined through its revelation of this truth. We now consider ourselves too sophisticated to think that a painting of some worn-out shoes reveals something so profound about the peasant woman’s being that there is no other way this can be grasped. And yet a little of this heideggerian desire remains. I find we still look for truth in painting despite thinking it unlikely. Or at least, I do.

At the height of the pandemic Stefanie Ullmann would walk and run in the rose gardens at the Isar, in May, when the magnolias are in bloom. These caught her attention – I remember how bright that spring was, and how vibrant the greens. But again it took a painting by van Gogh, this time, Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass (1888) for her to begin painting from memory a series of small canvases with flowers. A second series of watercolours followed. The oil paintings share van Goghs’ shimmering green-yellow palette as well as his strong horizontal and vertical lines.

*Vincent van Gogh, Sprig of flowering almond in a glass, 1888, oil on canvas, 24.5 cm x 19.5 cm*
*Credits: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)*

When I look at these paintings I find myself standing in Heidegger’s shoes. There is a truth in Stefanie Ullmann’s work that has to do with his schematic definition. On the one hand he claims, art has long been thought as formed matter, in other words as a “Zeug,” translated by Derrida as a “product,” more commonly in English translations of Heidegger’s essay as “equipment.” And these paintings here, especially the abstract ones, have this workman-like quality of being built, almost brick by brick, layer by layer. Occasionally Stefanie Ullmann even uses a spatula like a masonry trowel. And yet, as Derrida in his interpretation of Heidegger’s argument rightly notes, an artwork is more than a product or Zeug because it does what no other product can – it resembles a thing, “Ding.” It is as if it were not produced. Thus, an artwork is a product that is also more than a product, because it crosses over, steps into the realm of the thing. In the same way, Ullmann’s paintings enjoy this self-sufficiency. Despite their lightness, they feel as sturdy as earth or rock or tree, untouched by human hand.

The point of painting is – for Van Gogh, Heidegger, Derrida etc. – that this step crossing from thing to product and back again occurs within. Painting shows how tightly things, Zeug and artworks interlace.

5 Years

Tim Bennett, Jenny Dunseath, Jonah Gebka, Andrea Hanak, Jane Hayes-Greenwood, Hannes Heinrich, Melina Hennicker, David Henrichs, Stefanie Hofer, Lukas Hoffmann, Lou Jaworski, Steffen Kern, Stefan Lenhart, Jo Love, Michael Lukas, Robin Mason, Kathrin Partelli, Rebecca Partridge, Plastique Fantastique, Berthold Reiss, Miriam Salamander, Michael Schmidt, Maria Thurn und Taxis, Stefanie Ullmann, Maria VMier, Susanne Wagner, Youjin Yi, Andrea Zabric, Janka Zöller.

23.07 – 19.09.2020

5 Year GiG, installation view, 2020

Lukas Hoffmann, Untitled, 2020, MDF, Sulphur, Aluminium, 80 x 70 x 20 cm

Foreground: Andrea Zabric, Pigment Sculpture 21110, 2020, 5 kg cadmium red pressed pigment, size variable

Background: Lukas Hoffmann, Untitled, 2020, MDF, Sulphur, Aluminium, 80 x 70 x 20 cm

5 Year GiG, installation view, 2020

5 Year GiG, installation view, 2020

5 Year GiG, installation view, 2020

Foreground: Maria VMier, o.T., 2020 stained wood and marbles, 140 x 50 x 50 cm and Lukas Hoffmann, Untitled, 2020, MDF, 15 x 2,5 x 4 cm

5 Year GiG, installation view, 2020

Foreground: Kathrin Partelli, Aus Tagundnachtgleiche, 2018, Gummi, Porenbeton, Ziegelstein, 55 x 65 x 95 cm

Background: Michael Lukas, Frame, 2013, Mixed technique on wood, 46 x 32 x 4 cm

5 Year GiG, installation view, 2020

Foreground: Kathrin Partelli, Aus Tagundnachtgleiche, 2018, Gummi, Porenbeton, Ziegelstein, 55 x 65 x 95 cm

Background: Susanne Wagner, Conchita, 2020, Gefärbter Gips, 120 x 40 x 10 cm and Tim Bennett, untitled (o-garden I) gipskartonrelief, akrylfarbe, 85 x 70 cm

5 Years

Tim Bennett, Jenny Dunseath, Jonah Gebka, Andrea Hanak, Jane Hayes-Greenwood, Hannes Heinrich, Melina Hennicker, David Henrichs, Stefanie Hofer, Lukas Hoffmann, Lou Jaworski, Steffen Kern, Stefan Lenhart, Jo Love, Michael Lukas, Robin Mason, Kathrin Partelli, Rebecca Partridge, Plastique Fantastique, Berthold Reiss, Miriam Salamander, Michael Schmidt, Maria Thurn und Taxis, Stefanie Ullmann, Maria VMier, Susanne Wagner, Youjin Yi, Andrea Zabric, Janka Zöller.

23.07 – 19.09.2020

Image: Hannes Heinrich

Stefanie Ullmann

peaches N cream

26.05 – 13.07.2018

peaches N cream, 2018, installation view

o.T. 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 160 x 160 cm

o.T. (series of watercolours on paper) 2017-8, watercolour on paper 32 x 24 cm

o.T. 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 35 x 35 cm

Stefanie Ullmann’s paintings have always been minimal. Even at their most overworked, there was never much to see in or on her small to medium sized canvases. A rather distressed looking surface perhaps, a few meandering brushstrokes, some lines or a couple of smudges. Muted colours. For this exhibition, she has made four larger canvases, brighter and larger than her previous work perhaps, but equally paired down, consisting of a few random marks on pastel coloured ground. A quiet ‘no’ cries out from each individual frame, which is a distant echo of Minimalism’s earlier, much more stark and vehement ‘no’ to values associated with Abstract Expressionism: transcendence, heroism, anguish, ego and preciousness. If Robert Morris used a chainsaw to slice out his rejection of anything that might distract the viewer from the here and now, Ullmann uses the slightest of gestures to question what is the ‘just enough’ for a painting. A canvas for instance, would seem about right, but brushes are something that could easily be dispensed with. Much of the painting at the exhibition is made directly by squeezing a tube of paint onto unprimed canvas. One squeeze is sufficient for one mark.

Similarly to other minimalist artists, Ullmann directs her ‘no’ against artistic intentionality, the external motivation of a rational type, an idea existing prior to the making of the work which nevertheless dictates its final form and meaning from within. This is why there are no vestiges of illusion in her paintings and no gestures towards representation, and why, unlike many of her contemporaries she does not work between abstraction and figuration. Instead she utilises strategies that do away with intentionality altogether: by reducing the number of elements in her paintings, by rejecting the hierarchies between the component parts, sometimes by painting with her eyes closed and leaving things unfinished. And yet she never quite resorts to the complete impersonalisation of many anti-authorial practices. The personal remains important, her way of navigating what is deliberate and what is not.

The deliberate and the accidental – as with minimalism what we see is what we get. Here it is a number of marks on a peach and cream background. But this does not cause us to turn away from the canvas to investigate the work’s surroundings and their function within a larger space. The work does not depend on the moving spectator’s visual trajectory in that way. It is not, in Michael Fried’s sense of the term, theatrical, analogous to an actor producing effects on us the audience in real time. The here and now of Ullmann’s paintings always draws us closer. There may be little present in the work, but what is there draws us in, before saying stop, it is enough, now you can go no further. What is there keeps us hovering at the surface of painting, neither allowing us, as a beholder to forget ourselves by entering a state of transcendence nor to move away to engage with the work’s surroundings. With her work, we are always caught between one pole and the other. Between presentness and presence lies their state of grace.

Magdalena Wisniowska 2018

Stefanie Ullmann

peaches N cream

26.05 – 13.07.2018

IMG_1997 (1)

Vernissage: Freitag 25. Mai, 18 – 21 Uhr

Ausstellungsdauer: 26. Mai – 13. Juli 2018

Öffnungszeiten: Montag – Donnerstag, 15 – 18 Uhr

Bitte nach Vereinbarung unter contact@gig-munich.com

GiG Munich is pleased to present the new solo exhibition by Munich artist, Stefanie Ullmann, ‘peaches N cream.’

For the exhibition the artist has produced a new body of work,a series of large-scale paintings and smaller watercolours that wear their bright, pastel colours lightly.

Always a thoughtful and reflective painter, Ullmann has long pursued her unique kind of minimalism, one that slowly alerts us to the most minute of painterly gestures, meditating on the difference between the accidental and the deliberate. A certain roughness of texture perhaps, a brushstroke carelessly meandering across the raw canvas, a hint of colour, a smudge. In the past she achieved this through overworking her canvases, often painting and repainting the same distressed surface. For the exhibition she changed approach, to bring in a new lightness of touch. In an intellectual climate where it is more common to think the supplement or indeed, excess, she makes paintings according to the dictum of the ‘not too much / just enough.’