BEINGS/WESEN was
the title of an exhibition of recent paintings by German artist Martina Fischer
at Globe Institute Gallery in Tribeca. The exhibit featured eleven large-scale
oil-on-canvas paintings. This was the artist’s first solo show in New York.
In Fischer’s paintings,
the viewer encounters rather amorphous structures that seem to hover in front
of transparent, shadowy and endless backgrounds. Preoccupied with the rhythms
of line and harmonies of deep colors and dark browns, these paintings demonstrate
virtuosity of modeling, gradation, light and shadow.
The overall abstractions
here bear evident surreal overtones and a palpable presence of the third dimension.
Yet illusions of light and shadow intrude this series of pictures and function
as counterparts of linear design and color. As such, surface and paint coexist
with chiaroscuro, atmospheric effects and optical textures. Despite the predominance
of abstraction within these picture planes, they are ultimately representational,
since the flatness of High Modernism has been left behind.
The painterly rigors
of Fischer in these works evocatively project the dilemma of traditional academic
techniques in service of modernity. These works are inscribed by the sense of
tension between postmodernism and existentialism. They transcend an evitalizing
sense of flight, hope and beauty. It is this utter seriousness and commitment
to the field of painting as a timely, skillful and predetermined while self-defining
trace of the hand, eye, time and mind that lie behind the organic webs of these
surfaces. They absorb the viewer introspectively and gracefully, while they
unfold legacies of twentieth-century modernism. |
