Galerie Martina Kaiser is delighted to bring the 2024 art year to a close with the exhibition ‘Abstracts, Stills & Landscapes’. Selected works by Detlev Foth and Matthias Meyer as well as Sabine Moritz and Gerhard Richter will be shown, the latter from private collections.

The boundaries between abstraction and figuration are fluid, and the exhibition ‘Abstracts, Stills & Landscapes’ deliberately questions the dichotomy between figuration and alienation, which has long been regarded as an iron law.

Detlev Foth, Matthias Meyer, Sabine Moritz and Gerhard Richter have used both genres in their respective oeuvres, but have always merged them in their works, thus emphasising their mutual dependence. Every object is inherently abstract in its artistic reproduction, because it is already alienated through appropriation and personal interpretation. In the same way that the objective and objective nature of anything abstract can be identified through an individual view and interpretation. ‘Abstracts, Stills & Landscapes’ uses the four artists mentioned to show how the intermediate worlds of materiality and immateriality are recalibrated.

What they all have in common is that they completed their training or further education at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, one of the most renowned art schools in the world. Gerhard Richter crowned his attachment to the institution with many years of teaching as Professor of Painting (1971-1993).

The landscapes of Detlev Foth (*1959) form a perfect symbiosis of abstraction and representational painting and are characterised by a suggestive language of colour and immense expanses of perspective. Highly pastose and executed with a gestural style, the works bear witness to a strong physical component, while at the same time enriching the subject with sensuality and vivacity thanks to the virtuoso interplay of light and dark contrasts and the luminosity of all shades of blue and red.The works on paper by Rissa's master student further increase the degree of abstraction and create worlds of form and colour beyond any categorisation.

In his painting, Matthias Meyer (*1967) focusses on the flowing, always subject to change - and transfers the figuration into a transitory, floating state, so to speak, where perspectives as well as space and time seem to dissolve. His glazed, almost glass-like pictorial worlds create an almost unreal permeability; the motif language, sometimes reminiscent of calligraphic ink drawings, sometimes of enigmatic plant creatures, is highly filigree and of extreme colour sublimity. In his water landscapes, the master student of Gerhard Richter refers to its effect on the surface and plays eminently with the essence of depth and diffusion. 

In her still lifes of roses, lilies and peonies, Sabine Moritz (*1969) deals with the concept of time, above all the transience of the moment. In the context of the diffuse, abstract setting, the depiction of the present and the figurative, here in the form of flowers, is transformed into an allegory of memory, a daydream that has long since passed at the moment of contemplation. It is about fleetingness, fragility - and thus about the immaterial in the material. Or to put it another way: About the abstract in the concrete. The student of Gerhard Richter thus also proves herself to be the creator and chronicler of an intermediate world that oscillates between the poles of the real and the imaginary. 

At the beginning of his exceptional career, Gerhard Richter (*1932) still focussed strongly on figuration, but over the decades of his work he has taken abstraction into new spheres. In doing so, he developed completely new strategies and procedures that integrate the inclusion of chance and reduce the conscious control of the painting process. From his iconic colour panels to his ‘Vermalungen’ and ‘Abstrakte Bilder’, the range of his non-figurative works is exceptionally broad and diversified. Scrutinising the medium of painting becomes a fundamental component of Richter's work - and yet he repeatedly incorporates influences and references back to the figurative. As in the overpainted photographs, where reality and alienation merge.