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23/1/2014

Klaus-Martin Treder

Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin

“It’s always about the painting.” (Klaus-Martin Treder)

With Temptation II, the Jette Rudolph Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings and installations by Klaus-Martin Treder. Following his solo exhibition, Temptation*, at the Stadtgalerie (Town Gallery) in Saarbrücken in 2013, these artworks can now be viewed in a new arrangement and presentation format designed specifically for the location in Berlin.

Klaus-Martin Treder’s work (born in 1961 in Biberach/Riss, lives and works in Berlin & Stuttgart) can be grouped into three main categories: paintings, objects/installations and posters. All three media share one thing: Treder’s focus on questions addressing the aesthetics of material – a focus that goes beyond questions of conscious figurative or narrative intention, that explores approaches to site-specific presentation formats, and where the painting that is made of material and form is always at the center.

Intuitively calculated color labs
Treder’s paintings are abstract acrylic compositions and shapes. Their titles betray a serial principle – in exhibitions such as Loss of Orientation, Aesthetics 01 and Temptation 01. These works are plastic color landscapes that intentionally show how they are made and what they are made of: thick paint dribbles, calmed surfaces, branching webs of color, dynamic lines, as well as sublime dashes, streaks and shots of color. But it is in vain that one seeks brushstrokes or other elements characteristic of the artist’s style. The colors and forms are first applied intuitively. If the results are too figurative, they are immediately discarded.
For Treder, color is simultaneously an important work material, substance and object. The artist uses alchemistic and experimental techniques to explore the material possibilities of colors. He even exploits their tonal values. The possibilities that emerge are based on research on color spaces in the real world – from perfumeries to prefabricated buildings, from advertising to comic books. In painstaking processes and in part from complicated formulas, the artist calculates pigment compositions, ultimately mixing them himself. Grey, white and brown dominate. Then accents and lines in powerful shades of red, yellow, orange and black brighten up the various artworks, but an entire painting rarely just consists of bright, happy colors.

A constructive-conceptual montage principle and a symbolic presentation format
Abstraction once detached the form and material from the object to be represented. At the end of postmodernism and after passing through many stages of development, what remained was pure color and form that existed for their own sake, a painting that, above all, insists on its material existence. Entirely along these lines, Klaus-Martin Treder directs our gaze to the what and how of his works.
They appear before us made of canvas, form and color. At the same time, they are multifaceted contradictions and humorous material assemblages – because seemingly absurd moments surface throughout the tableaus as ‘objets placés’: sugarcoated gumdrops, shiny pills, coffee beans, bottle caps, even hair. Some of these real objects are pressed into the paint when it is still fresh; some are directly applied to the background, and some are coated with color. Moreover, it turns out that the artist has added entire sections, drippings or net-like webs of color to the picture afterwards, intentionally placing them from outside. The gesture towards the painting becomes a collage-like gesture on the painting – the artistic act beyond the painting is pasted right into the painting as a dash of color. In all these montage paintings, constructive and deconstructive elements fuse; coincidence meets artistic calculation (Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde).

Klaus-Martin Treder’s paintings are anything but narrative. Yet they tell stories. The creative processes and observations that the artist pursues in various forms and media leave traces. The observer is invited to take an exact look, to track and explore them. In the process, the viewer will discover an interaction between calculation and impulse, precision and sensuality, concept and openness. It is a game with references, intuition and the beauty of colors, forms and materiality. In Treder’s abstract compositions – which Andrea Jahn refers to as a multifaceted way of “painting about painting” – the mystery of artistic creation manifests itself in many different shapes, thereby suspending a search for meaning based on hermeneutic criteria. Instead, the compositions ask to be explored intuitively and with empathy. That is because: “It’s always about the painting.”

Opening 24th January h 18-22

Galerie Jette Rudolph GmbH
Strausberger Platz 4, Berlin
Hours: Tue-Fri 11am-5pm
Amission free

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