Karl Wiebke

Paintings

5 - 31 October 2018

 Karl Wiebke is an artist concerned with process. The artist lays out a strict formality of how each work is to be created. These rules correspond with the materiality and physicality of the work; medium - the paint, the canvas and the support. 

 One might infer that such formality in the production and process of making the artwork would result in robotic or static outcome. However, the subtly of the gesture and mind-boggling time commitment the artist has given to each painting propels the work into the sublime. 

Beauty may not have been in the recipe, but it is in the ‘making’ that the works come alive. In conversation, Wiebke has admitted to ‘creating artworks that no one else would be mad enough to make’. This exhibition consists of eight paintings. Each canvas consists of a background mass of single colour overlaid with multi-directional lines of a different colour or colours. Illusionism is at work here. From a distance, the surfaces appear almost monochromatic, but upon close inspection, one discovers a surface of multilayered linear forms of vibrant colours. Wiebke’s sensitivity to colour is paramount in his practice and the complexity of each coloured surface is the result of a considerable period of repetitive labour. The surface also acts as a record in two ways – it is both spatial and temporal. Spatial – layers of colour and linear form create the illusion of depth and shallow space, and temporal – as a record of process and labour over time