NYAB Event - Klaus Merkel “Master Slave System (afterglow)”

Klaus Merkel “Master Slave System (afterglow)”

Joe Sheftel Gallery

This event has ended.

Joe Sheftel presents Master Slave System (afterglow), an exhibition of paintings by Klaus Merkel.

Excerpted from a text by Nicolás Guagnini:

“In an interview from 1993, German painter Klaus Merkel discusses Newman’s attack on painting catalogues as foundational to his pictorial project:

‘Barnett Newman’s attack has become famous. It claims the battle is aimed at the catalogue and, from this point of view, he surely means the copy-like character of reproductions. He feels the catalogue as such works against painting because the sublime, pure picture we see and are meant to perceive is destroyed by its reproduction. But I would like to intensify the issue for the present debate. Painting today not only has to defend itself against the catalogue, but also has to internalize the catalogue in order to maintain its hold on pictures and exhibitions as a consequence of pictures. The catalogue as such would then be something like the final container for pictures.’[1]

Newman’s defense of the auratic was expressed with the violent clarity that characterizes the polemics of his generation in a 1970 issue of Art News to celebrate the centennial of the Met:

‘I have always had a distaste—even a disdain— for reproductions and photographs of artworks, even those of my own work. That is why I do not own a collection of books of reproductions. Unless I have seen the original work so that a photograph can remind me of my own real experience, photographs and slides have little interest for me. It seems to me that an art education based on this material is nothing but a mirage.’[2]

…

Klaus Merkel works in sets, groups and series that interlock in an overarching project, introducing extended time in an open-ended project composed of sub-series. The basic structure is diagrammatic. The composition of each individual painting is a catalogue of frames and gestures that refers to the catalogue at large. Conversely, the relationship between formats and individual paintings is analogical to the internal composition of each. This mode of production is potentially infinite but by no means indeterminate. Ultimately, the terms “catalogue” and “series” collapse into a perpetual feedback loop, cataloguing itself without closure. This stages a specific resistance to highly convincing endgame scenarios, to the mandate to produce “the last painting.” Merkel is historically positioned such that his project negates and makes unavailable to him the Hegelian notion of the avant-garde, in which each formal problem comes to a solution, a problem epitomized by Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt.”

Guagnini continues:

“Which other master signifiers are evoked and addressed here? Who is enslaved? Reinhardt, Newman’s principal interlocutor, once referred to his black paintings as “the only paintings that cannot be misunderstood,” leading to half a century of misunderstandings. Can Merkel be understood in his perpetual refractory re-mastering of his own images? The slave resists. What is this exhibition resisting in the era of flippers, of dollars and paintings changing hands at digital instagramic speed? “Crapstraction” and “Flip Art” are ostensibly process based and quickly executed abstract paintings. Process in Merkel is always carefully framed within the structure of the catalogue—drips and brushstrokes can only co-exist relative to strict compositional elements. If anything, his visual project is a critique of the unified picture, and of vision and the mechanism of perception itself, harking back a debate about the pictorial plane initiated in analytical cubism that precedes even the Newman/Reinhardt axis. The anachronism is the afterglow. The master-slave dialectic is full of historicity. The present hurts. Here, now, Merkel is topping from the bottom.”

Klaus Merkel was born in 1953 in Heidelberg, Germany. This will be his first exhibition with the gallery.