Wade Guyton
23 April – 22 August 2010
Jochen Lempert
23 April – 13 June 2010
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
50667 Köln
Germany
info [at] museum-ludwig.de
23 April – 22 August 2010
Others have painted with brushes, with light, with sounds, even with metaphors. Wade Guyton paints with an inkjet printer. That sounds cool and ultra-smooth, but it’s actually an unusual and exhausting affair. For such a printer, even an industrial model, is not made for such (ab)use. It is supposed to print paper. If it is fed with canvas, the printhead at times loses its grip; it produces elisions and streaks. The artist must therefore constantly keep watch over the printing process, readjust the canvas and even pull on it to achieve the desired image.
The printer can only process half of the 1.75 meters of the width he has chosen for the Cologne work. For which reason the artist folds the canvas lengthwise. When the one half has finished its run through the printer, he turns the canvas around and prints the other side. The monochrome black planes, stripes and bars, which Guyton has recently begun using very often, are computer-generated. These very elementary geometric forms are printed again and again on the white canvas.
Whereby Guyton follows a strict plan; it is for instance important that the dimensions of each canvas be adapted to the technical details and the space in question. As noted, the cited width corresponds exactly to double the printer’s format capacity, while the length of 7.75 meters is that of the usual commercial bolt of canvas. Although the width of all the artist’s works produced on this printer is the same, the length is oriented to the architecture of the exhibition room, here the high facing wall of the large skylit hall at Museum Ludwig.
At the same time in Museum Ludwig:
Jochen Lempert
23 April – 13 June 2010
Jochen Lempert’s black and white photographs are dedicated to nature and the animal kingdom. Born 1958 in Moers in Germany, and now living in Hamburg, the artist has worked since the 1990s with the expertise of a trained biologist, the eye of a photographer, and the methods of a scientist. In his early work he collected, archived and systematised his motifs in large groups that prompted the viewer to compare the images and open up a wide array of associations. In his most recent pieces he has increasingly directed his interest to patterns, formations, and structures whose aleatory power reveals itself in swarms of birds, configurations of water and formations of clouds. He investigates how far they are given anthropomorphic interpretations or industrial uses amid the cross-currents of nature and culture, and how they stealthily capture new niches in urban space.
In Museum Ludwig Jochen Lempert will hang around 60 photographs from the last 15 years in a space measuring around 500 m2.
