Ida Ekblad & others @ Galerie Max Hetzler

‘Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work.’ With these words the Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell explained her relationship to painting and abstraction. On its own, abstraction was for Mitchell an empty shell. As a label it had come to characterise too much and too little all at once.   In her all-over compositions Mitchell demonstrates what surface work is and how it can express feeling.

In the exhibition SURFACE WORKS – Ida Ekblad, Günther Förg, Joan Mitchell, Albert Oehlen, Rebecca Warren presents a series of works, all made in 2009, showing Förg’s attempt to make sense of colour and form on his own terms.  Ida Ekblad’s paintings contain a riotous energy. Inspiration is taken from a multitude of sources – archives of different kinds, film and music all come together to furnish Ekblad’s eclecticism.  The surfaces of Rebecca Warren’s bronze sculptures are often given another work-over with paint so that it roils with the ground, articulating, dissolving and dredging information from what lies beneath.