Malerei? Malerei! / Painting? Painting!
23.11.–14.12.2019

Exhibition
Lorenz Boskovic/Vincent Scarth, Zurich
Bettina Rave, Berlin
Gela Samsonidse, Freiburg i.B.
Heidi Schöni/Marianne Müller, Schmidshof TG / Zurich

Opening: 23.11.19, 5 pm

With portrait salon on the weekend of 23./24.11.19

Renate Clematide, Caroline Müller, Priska Senn, Raffaela Troiero, Susanne Vieli

www.portraitomat.ch

Which are the conditions of painting, what are its questions? Which media does it allow? What forms of collaboration?

Lorenz Boskovic and Vincent Scarth paint themselves while constantly talking, shoulder to shoulder, on the same painting. Through painting, they document their surroundings and consciously blur the boundaries between reality, image and narrative.

Bettina Rave often reflects painting in other media as well, especially in video and text-based works. Within her sculptural work ‘cadmium rot hell’, she shows blown-up portraits of color sausages [Farbwürsten] as they are squeezed out of a tube. The individual objects can both stand on their own or be staged together as wall installations.

Gela Samsonidse’s paintings combine figurative depictions of people with an abstract background. Painterly, he thus creates a dense, structural pictorial ground that captures the figurative, narrative figure, thus creating space for interpretation. Visible are figures painted with liquid oil paints and a fine but dynamic line, which are balanced by the geometric austerity of the structural, monochrome, woven backgrounds.

Within their collaborative color shots in enamel and acrylic paints on refined painting boards, Heidi Schöni and Marianne Mueller work less on the painting discourse than on infiltrating it in an intermedial and playful way. Here, the joint application of paint, to the decidedly small-format carriers backed on the back with precious papers, is always also a performative, sometimes installative act of laying out, selecting and revising.