Opening: April 30, 6 - 9 pm

Special opening hours during Berlin Gallery Weekend: May 2 - 4

Fri 12 – 9 pm

Sat 11 am – 6 pm

Sun 11 am - 6 pm

 

Artist talk: May 3 at 2 pm


Galerie Nothelfer is delighted to be showing seven different positions on the subject of ink drawings. Both historical positions from the post-war period and contemporary artists will offer an insight into the medium.

When - as in the INK exhibition - the material becomes the curatorial bracket, there is a justified expectation that this material itself has something special to tell, that it can become the carrier of discourses that unite both historical and processual aspects, without this necessarily leading to an antagonistic clash of form, material and content.

INK, whereby there is often a conceptual blurring in the German translation between Tinte and Indian ink, thus becomes the theme of this exhibition of works on paper and other pictorial media, which spans a period of 60 years and thus connects the informal basis of the gallery programme with current positions.

In art history, ink is the generic term for all colouring liquids used for writing and drawing. It is created by mixing water, sooty particles and binding materials. There is also the real cuttlefish sepia and iron-gallus inks from chemical reactions. In fact, even among specialists, there is a terminological confusion due to the large number of liquids that contain colour pigments.

However, ink as a material has a long art-historical tradition in both the Orient and the Occident, and its proximity to the act of writing in particular opens up a wide range of relational contexts. Put simply, in calligraphy, writing becomes an image and in this position of the semantic in-between - between pictogram and ideogram - ink plays a decisive role. Its flow determines the ductus of the form. Either the control succeeds or it fails. Whether pen or brush. A tool held by the artist - and there are countless of them - manipulates the liquid and determines its form, its expansion and its intensity.

 

Ink is first and foremost something that flows. ‘Panta rei’, one might say, its liquidity is its core characteristic. Depending on the concentration, it is either washed, i.e. diluted with water, and appears in translucent swathes, or it appears in the deepest darkness, so saturated that it infiltrates the material like a concentrated brew. Controlling or even stopping its flow becomes a challenge. The picture carrier acts as a necessary collaborator. It absorbs the puddles and streams until every pore is filled.

Seen in this way, ink is often an agent of the diffuse. This visual state of aggregation can, of course, be due to a deliberate coincidence, allow for a materially implicit aleatoricism and also provoke it. 

Text excerpt: Jan-Philipp Frühsorge