From "Formalismus. Moderne Kunst, heute" (Formalism. Modern Art, today) at the Kunstverein in Hamburg.

9 October 2004 - 9 January 2005

Exhibition catalogue

Michaela Meise by Isabelle Graw (pp 104-113)

Michaela Meise is a German artist (born 1976) based in Berlin.

Michaela Meise, Also and Sister, 2004, block board, acrylic,

synthetic resin lacquer.

The author discusses how Meise's objects in the Formalismus exhibition resist definition. They are precarious structures that make them seem transitory and temporary, but because they are tall, angular structures they also conjure a body in relation and feel somehow protective. They have anthropomorphic associations. Graw maintains that for all their precarity they are "infused with a concrete aesthetic vocabulary" reminiscent of minimalist and postminimalist aesthetics.

Michaela Meise, o.T./Untitled, 2003, cardboard and sellotape.

Her cardboard and sellotape pieces, Graw says, are an "interplay of coincidence and structure that once fascinated the Surrealists" but reflected the uncertain times in which they lived post - World War l.

I can see parallels here to my work in that an object can be built around an inherent weakness but grounded in a concrete aesthetic. Or more accurately, what seems like an aesthetic is really a process. The decisions I make are relational rather than aesthetic in that they aren't necessarily about what I think looks good, but how one piece can relate (connect) to another. I'm always asking the material what it will allow me to do.

It's the precariousness that speaks of the need to be adaptable in our current climate. I'm starting to see that precarity also holds an edge of feminine doubt or imposter syndrome when I'm running up against the ghosts of the masculine monumental Modernists like Stella and Serra. Those inherent weaknesses are points of difference to their ilk so in that respect the formal weaknesses are conceptual strengths.

Anselm Reyle by Dominic Eichler (pp 150-157)

Anselm Reyle is a German visual artist, (born 1970) based in Berlin. He is known for his often large-scale abstract paintings and found-object sculptures.

Anselm Reyle, Untitled, 2004.

Eichler delves into Anselm Reyle's Modernist eye-wink, the way that he prods at Modernist cliches and in doing so examines ideas of taste in contemporary art.

"He knows, and he knows that we know that for some time now abstract painting that purports to be just abstract painting or primarily concerned with its formal qualities has generally been considered argued out of any viable existence... As a consequence abstract paintings often get assessed about as quickly, suspiciously and just about as brutally as a stranger in a train."

In other words, dismissed as old-fashioned and no longer relevant.

But Reyle is aware that it's exactly at this time that an art form "becomes possible again". And not ironically nor a wholesale reverent revival. But re-testing some of those ideas in contemporary time.

I often get the impression that what I make is viewed by the art world as old-fashioned. Perhaps at first glance it could be dismissed as a modernist re-hash but I'm not making obstinate objects - they hold 'for now' in a provisional state. I'm not adhering to the modernist idea of truth to materials. The plywood is usually covered in paint and only revealed if it might serve the work. Hubris is replaced with agonism. As the works get larger, any claims to monumentality are undercut by the delicacy of temporariness.

Katja Strunz by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith (p 184-191)

Katja Strunz (b. 1970, Ottweiler, Germany) lives and works in Berlin.

Katja Strunz, Zeittraum, 2003. Installation view.

Strunz's work revolves around the intertwining of time, space, and matter. Mac Giolla Leith describes it as reconstituting shards of the past, or "wounded nostalgia". The utopian ideals held in the 1960's are now tarnished - the shine has most definitely worn off. But Strunz's practice has an optimism that transforms material from collapse to recovery. Re-ordering, renewing, and provisional. As Strunz has said "Today is not yesterday."

The formal strategy that she often uses for her wall sculptures is the fold, influenced by Robert Smithson's Crystal Structure (1963-64). The fold holds potential for infinity, complexity, and contradictions. Like expansion and contraction, interior and exterior, light and shadow, seen and unseen. She plays with surface treatments as well, often painting new pieces of wood, and leaving older pieces to retain their natural patina.

Although Strunz's work draws parallels with modernist and minimalist work, she "rejects the machine-tooled precision and imposing scale of high Minimalism in favour of a more intimate, studio-based and arguably more traditionally European, sense of handicraft. So too does she, along with quite a few of her contemporaries, reject classic minimalism's rhetoric of an ostensibly timeless purity in favour of a very contemporary poetics of hybridity and continual reconstitution."

Katja Strunz, Untitled, 2003, wood and paint.

As a child of the 70's I have always thought that I was sold a shiny utopian future that never showed up. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to the lightly held together compositions that I make - pieces brought together temporarily, improvising and adaptable.