Imi Knoebel, etcetera @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

Imi Knoebel, 

The website blurb for Imi Knoebel's etcetera at Thaddaeus Ropac's Marais gallery doesn't offer many ways into the exhibition. It says that his "abstract art investigates the fundamentals of painting and sculpture through an exploration of form, colour and material. [Knoebel's] aim is to uncover the basic material elements of art, which he locates in the simple interactions between humans and the essential conditions of our world." Isn't this what every abstract painter does? And couldn't we say this about any number of abstract works? It seems such a generic and ungenerous way to describe Knoebel's abstraction. Because, in these paintings, he is doing something quite unique. 

Imi Knoebel, CIII (2024)

Knoebel paints on metal most of the time, creating a surface that is fast, transparent and, in many cases, luminous. The literature references Malevich, but the artist whose work most resonated in my mind as I wandered the three floors of this exhibition was Ellsworth Kelly. Knoebel may have little interest in Kelly's work, but these energetic works are, at times, exploring some of the same parameters of painting. Knoebel's paintings challenge perception and our trust in what we see, in how we see and, much of the time, this is achieved through colour. At a distance from works in the main gallery, they shift in size and shape depending on where we stand. The edges of the metal support appears to weft and warp, squares becoming trapezoids, quadrilaterals with non-parallel sides. Up close, I tried to decipher the exact shape of the support, often in vain. That said, there are works for which the aluminium has obvious non-parallel sides, even if, from some angles, they appear as square.

Imi Knoebel, LXIV (2023)

The markings are also unique in that they are somewhere between expressionist swipes and graffiti markings. There are a lot of lines and strokes, swiping of different colours together as the brush is swept down or across the support. The transparency of paint comes from these very quick strokes, sometimes making shapes, at others, remaining lines. Unlike a lot of abstract painting, it is almost impossible to see something familiar in the surface markings of Knoebel's. Rather, in a more modernist tradition - perhaps more reminiscent of Philip Guston than Malevich - we see the shapes moving, vibrating, shifting to demarcate foreground and background, left and right of the picture plane. We also see negotiations between figure and ground, as if in a search for balance on the canvas. Strokes become explorations of space as it is drawn thanks to the restlessness of our vision. 

Imi Knoebel, XXXV (2023)

In the absoluteness of their abstraction, we see Knoebel's pictures engaged in questions of structure, how and where to place the line within the four (uneven) sides of a support. Similarly, in the sliding of paint up and down, around, creating shapes, there is an interrogation of what is a brushstroke. At least, he asks, what is its purpose? Where does it begin and end? Is it used to define or to shade? Sometimes the line looks like it might be hieroglyphic, a secret language telling stories for the initiated only. At other times, there is something resembling art brut about the lines, childlike scribbles on paper. And in still other paintings, the graffiti-like language screams a confused expressionism. 

Imi Knoebel, XXXVI (2023)

Not only is Knoebel doing something unique in his paintings, but the works are also diverse. Some are pretty, others harsh, others exploratory. Each has a different tone, depending on the colour and shape, direction, purpose of the line. In the upstairs gallery, smaller works on paper started to resemble indeterminate spaces, rooms, with objects—furniture for example—inside. All of which is to say, I was pleasantly surprised at the freshness of these paintings, to see them embracing so many different languages of abstraction, speaking to different moments in the history of painted abstraction. They are doing a lot more than is claimed in the publicity, making a rewarding visit.

Dans le Flou. une autre vision de l’art de 1945 à nos jours @ Orangerie

This exhibition includes many great individual works, but as an exhibition, it goes in many different directions. It also tends to stay on the surface of the many different, and otherwise rich debates around the blur and indistinct. Inspired by, or more accurately, set in motion by Monet's Water Lillies — because it's the Orangerie, the connection must be made — the exhibition sections move from Monet's blindness, through postwar disillusionment with the precision of modernity, the unrepresentability of the Holocaust, the deception of media and technology, and the uncertainty of abstract expressionism, to the "mistakes" of amateur photography, the blur/screen/hazy/disintegrating image can be connected to a whole lot of motivations in the twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Gerhard Richter, Blumen, 1994, CR 815-3

To be sure, as I say, there are some magnificent works in the exhibition. As a Richter fan, I was happy to see a range of his paintings as they are surely central to any exhibition considering blurring and indistinction. Richter's Flowers prompted thought of another theme that could have been added, that of death. Spirits, ghosts, the other worldly and their depiction thanks to photography are a noticeable absence here. The representation of the unseen in the 20th century was inspired by the invention of photography, and it could have been placed as a fulcrum or springboard to cohere the exhibition. As it was, there was a distinct lack of context and comprised a lot of images that shared this element of haziness.

Vincent Dulom, Hommage à Monet, 2024

Some of the individual rooms worked very well. A room called "At the Frontier of the Visible" with works by Vincent Dulom, (Hommage à Monet, 2024), Ugo Rondinone (No. 42 Vierzehnterjanuarneunzehnhundertdreiundneunzig, 1996), Wojciech Fangor (N 17, 1963) was particularly compelling. In this room, the spectator is confronted with the deceptions of the eye. We think of our eyes as seeing things as they are, reality as it is, and yet, as we look at these paintings, they move, shift, vibrate, disappear. In front of these works, we are reminded that vision is as unstable as the world we are looking at. At the same time, each of these works makes a claim for the idea of paint as itself an apparition, something that floats on the surface of a canvas before disappearing. 

Philippe Cognée, Métamorphose I, 2011

If visitors are able to enjoy the exhibition for individual works, Philippe Cognée's Métamorphose I, 2011, is an absorbing and complex work. A large encaustic painting of high rise buildings that Cognée proceeds to go over with a hot iron. The wax melts and with it, the buildings collapse. In a section together with Richter's September 2005, and Thomas Ruff's jpeg ny01.2004, both of which represent smoke pouring out of the World Trade Centre towers, Cognée's painting takes on sinister meaning. Not only does he represent the cities metamorphosing and growing, but the melted wax shows the building and rebuilding of the urbanscape is a destructive measure. 

Gus van Sant, Elephant, 2003

The exhibition closes with a display of fragments from famous films that include some version of the blurry, out of focus, or indistinct. Again, there is no context for the very different examples shown, from Gus van Sant's Elephant (2003) to Hong Sang-Soo's In Water, 2023. Given the centrality of technological images to the notion of the blur, it would have been nice to see more integrity given to these few films by, for example, drawing attention to or at the very least, describing, the very different uses of the blur for these films. All in all, the exhibition is slim on intellectual substance and rich on images, making it disappointing in some ways and a treat in others. 

Lucas Arruda Qu'importe le paysage @ Musée d'Orsay

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

It was a treat to visit Lucas Arruda's exhibition, Qu'importe le paysage, with my friend Janise, a painter. Painters always give me a whole new perspective on art, often noticing details that escape my critical eye. And what I learnt looking through Janise's eyes is just how daring it is to make such obvious references to the icons of the past. Arruda's references are multiple and range over centuries, from Romanticism (both British and German) through Monet to Rothko. And yet, his paintings are like none of the above. Still, he has the courage, not simply to quote Rothko, but to make paintings that, at first glance, are similar. I would add to this, Arruda has the courage to paint and paint small. These small quiet, sometimes meditative canvases are not exactly following the trends of today's art world. Which, through my eyes, makes them even more special. 

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2022

Lucas Arruda's star is rising. After solo exhibitions at David Zwirner galleries around the world, and included in exhibitions at the Pinault collection, Parisians now have the opportunity to immerse themselves in another solo show at the Musée d'Orsay. In an age when the artists who attract attention are often working with new technologies, and dealing with hot political and social topics, Arruda paints pictures resembling landscapes or fully abstract, on very small canvases. But for Arruda, small is expansive. Small enables choice for Arruda. Small opens up possibilities for him to explore detail, to create surprises on the canvas, to obsessively go over and over and over. Often the brushes that he uses are so small that it can look as though he has scratched the surface, resembling hatching or a drypoint technique. From these markings, and a lot of scraping, pushing, and spreading of paint, light appears, waves on the ocean move, clouds burst, rain falls. 

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2021

To call the Arruda's paintings landscapes feels misleading. They are only landscapes, seascapes, clearings in a densely vegetated forest, or cloudscapes because we see this in them, satisfying our desire for familiarity. They are more like spaces into which we are invited to immerse our visual imaginations. It is also clear that Arruda doesn't set out to paint a landscape—and has been quoted as saying as much. Rather, he paints, strips away, pushes around, works and reworks until light appears, somewhere unanticipated. These delicate paintings are thus also about light. They have been called melancholic, but to my eyes, they are quite hopeful. The light of the moon and the sun comes out of clouds, splashes over waves, emanates from the canvas, as though it has been pulled out of the depths of the painting, found through a meticulous, painstaking going over and over. 

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

In order to see the radiance of these works, it's important to stand back and watch the pictures glow. Their luminosity is no doubt helped by the grey walls and the lighting at the Musée d'Orsay, like beacons of light pulling us towards them.  In one of the most exquisite paintings, Arruda's process finds a small moon in the ocean, a gesture of white paint, confusing the time in an already timeless place. A moon in the day light? A reflection of the sun behind clouds? A luminescence emerging from deep in the ocean? It's impossible to say. All we know is that there is something mysterious, something not quite of our world illuminating the one within the frame,

Lucas Arruda, Qu'importe le paysage @ Musée d'Orsay
Installation View

Arruda's horizons are always low, allowing more space for the clouds, air, light. Often they look to be etched, scratched, stripped where the paint moves horizontally, in a direction at odds with the paint covering the rest of the canvas. The horizon can be barely distinguishable, but it is always there, powerful and defined because it is horizontal. In addition, the air above moves to a different rhythm as well as a different direction from what we see as the water below. On exiting the rooms filled with nineteenth-century French painting, I was struck by the resonance of Arruda's graceful canvases with Courbet's blustering Stormy Sea (1870). While the mood and temperature of Courbet's painting bears no resemblance to Arruda's, the horizon line, fast and firm, going nowhere, is identical. The connections to Monet's light-filled canvases can also be appreciated from certain vantage points inside the Arruda exhibition. The resonances are not only seen in the emergence of light through paint, and the movement of paint as light, but the navigation of the horizontal and vertical, as well as the different paths paint takes around a canvas within these lines. Arruda's work might be filled with references, but he is an artist who has the confidence to do what comes to him, free of influence.

Do Ho Suh, Walk the House @ Tate Modern

Do Ho Suh, My Homes, 2010

As someone who has lived in different countries, I was fully immersed in and mesmerized by Do Ho Suh's Walk the House exhibition at Tate Modern. I was right there with him in his project to convince us of the ways that space and architecture are simply the tangible structures for housing identity, memory, and the experiences that give meaning to life. I immediately identified with his desire to find home—whatever that means—within walls, in the objects around him, the intuitive sense of the air that fills a space, the relationships developed therein. As a voyager, like him, I know that home has to be portable, able to be experienced in multiple apartments, carried on my back, across oceans and decades. But, I kept wondering if visitors rooted in a single country, culture, house or apartment were able to fully engage with the longing and yearning for belonging? These feelings are what really shape those of us who lead transitory lives.

Do Ho Suh, Blueprint, 2014

Immediately inside the exhibition, a series of works set a tone that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has spent a life in transition. Colourful images of homes on legs and wheels, rushing to the next location in My Homes (2010), or connected to a parachute flying across skies in (Haunting Home, 2019) are touching, playful, and all too real for those of us who have never sat still. Another work for which Do Ho Suh has used the same process— hundreds of multi-coloured threads embedded on paper—sees a facade of a New York apartment block with a figure blending into the tangled web of threads on the inside. The complex weave of life inside the front door, through the window, the emotions, experiences, woven into the fabric of daily life, that we nevertheless keep hidden from others are the substance of our life inside any space that we occupy. 

Do Ho Suh, Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul, 2024

Do Ho Suh works in multiple media, but I especially enjoyed his use of fabric. In a work such as Perfect Home (2024), handles, locks, sockets, wall telephones, bells, keypads from multiple apartments in which the artist has lived are integrated into a transparent polyester model of his London apartment. Visitors are invited to walk through the space as well as around it, watching others as shadows—like ghosts—on the other side, removing the distinction between inside and outside, and with it the certainty of who occupies and who is locked out. Bringing together fixtures from multiple apartments across borders and oceans, cultures and customs, Do Ho Suh's Perfect Home is not fixed in time; it is an accumulation of times and spaces. The perfect home is marked by entrances and exits, the turning on and off of a light switch. Home, in this work is defined by the transitional, the motion between here and there. Similtaneously, home is the familiar, yet mundane things that we hold onto as if they were forever.   

Do Ho Suh, Nests, 2024

Thanks to the different forms and fabrics of his installations, the exhibition is connected by ideas and feelings about home and our relationships to spaces. Dong In Apartments (2022) is a video reconstruction of decaying modernist apartment blocks in Seoul shortly before their destruction. The camera halts at windows, furniture, floors, and walls, as if to document loss, searching for the crevices where memories live. Chairs remember the person who sat in them, the people who breathed the air are still there, the furniture arranged to bring back the lives whose stories are told by the walls. The film reminds us that space is not static, because time doesn't sit still, that the thresholds and props of our lives keep moving, if only, as is the case in this film, into demolition and another living and working space.

Do Ho Suh, Robin Hood Gardens, 2018
Film still

Houses, spaces, buildings carry memories inside their walls, the feeling of the air, the layout of the walls become so familiar that we navigate them intuitively, our eyes closed. Spaces created in concrete and steel look different when others are next to us, inside together. For Do Ho Suh, we carry this baggage on our backs, wherever we go. For him, Home is a feeling inside of which we are surrounded by the mess of our emotions and senses, nothing to do with the walls themselves. Across the exhibition, as we move through passageways, around fabric sculptures, up close to threaded images, we find the often invisible threads that bind us together across generations, oceans, and cultures. For all of the physical journeying that we undertake, the material that brings life to the notion of home, for Do Ho Suh, these threads, have both a material and non-material existence. And despite the physical existence of the walls around us, and the emphasis we place on the intransigence of objects, the overwhelming message of the exhibition is that home is carried inside us. 

Oliver Beer, Resonance Paintings: The Cave 2 Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

Resonance Paintings: The Cave 2
Installation @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Oliver Beer's paintings are mesmeric. Walking into Thaddaeus Ropac's Marais gallery was like entering a mystical space of worship. The experience was made haunting and mythical by the sound filling the main gallery space, the walls adorned with paintings, carrying the visitor into an almost transcendental state. Hung with one painting on the south wall and three on each of the side walls, the paintings could be mistaken for a transposition or translation of religious scenes, an abstraction of figures ascending from earth to the heavens. Moreover, the large paintings along side walls in the main gallery remind of triptychs on an altar.Wisps of earthy pigment drift upwards to blue and white skies. 

Oliver Beer, Resonance Painting (Winter Morning), 2025

Beer worked with singers in the Paleolithic painted caves of Dordogne, where he discovered that the voices had a unique resonance. The sound recordings were then placed beneath loose pigment covered canvases, the vibrations of the music moving pigments to create abstract forms, paintings that are literally a visualization of music, in images that remind of the mysterious cave paintings. On entry to the main gallery, I didn't know whether to look at or listen to the paintings. Inside the gallery, the music that inspired the work was played, inviting the visitor to drift into the spirit of the works. In the breaks between soundtracks, in the quiet of the space, we were shown that the paintings function in time. Beer's process is slow and develops over time, processing and then re-using the sound recorded in the Lascaux caves. Similarly, the experience of the paintings gathers profundity over the time spent with them.

Oliver Beer, Resonance Painting (Sweet Wood), 2025

Beer's paintings not only merge music/sound and painting, but they are filtered through history. In an interview, Beer tells of how the sonic vibrations in the caves become increasingly resonant when his microphone is closer to the drawings that have existed for thousands of years. Thus, the paintings become tracings of a history, even if the exact time period is not clear. We can only ever know that a history is behind the drawings, not what that history is. In addition, when recording, Beer discovered that certain frequencies of the human voice stimulate sounds from the cave walls, creating sounds that transcend those produced by the singers. The mystical sounds are thus created through the stories of the walls over thousands of years. Simultaneously, the sound filling the gallery space is reinforced as placeless, having travelled across distant times, belonging outside of the material world.

Oliver Beer, Resonance Paintings (Shadows), 2025

That said, there is also something very physical, even corporeal about the works. Having recently rewatched David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), the pulsations and vibrations of pigment formed on the surface of Beer's canvases reminded me of scars on bodies from accidents, skin ripped open and sewn back together, trauma traced on skin. While there is nothing traumatic about the paintings, we remember that the sense of the past is heightened by the traces of what took place before. In turn, though we do not know what happened to the Aurignacians (who painted the cave walls 15,000 years ago), we do know that they disappeared, moved on, perhaps because of climate change or disease. The darkness and lightness of history are thus brought to mind in these superb works.

Resonance Paintings: The Cave 2
Installation @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Beer also talks about how his paintings speak to the history of art, in particular, twentieth century abstraction. Abstract painters have always been inspired by music, particularly in their search for painting beyond materiality and representation. Beer's works move into the space of complete abstraction when we are lifted up and away by them, as if to another realm, all the time maintaining their materiality. Beer's abstractions are both conceptually inspired by music and reach this transcendental ethereal space created through music. Similarly, as I say, Beer literally takes us to this realm through exploring the space between the two mediums, encouraging us both to listen and to look, simultaneously. As such, thanks to the synergetic space of image and sound, Beer's Resonance Paintings exceed the limits of abstract painting.

Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen @ Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Josephsohn vue par Albert Oehlen
Installation View

I dragged my feet a little to this exhibition; the sculptures looked interesting but unvaried in the posters around town. It took time, walking around, but over the course of a couple of hours, I was charmed and increasingly fascinated by Josephsohn's bold and intensely emotional works. Likewise, the sculptures gained in complexity over the course of my two hour visit. The exhibition was curated by Swiss artist Albert Oehlen who wanted to privilege the materiality of the sculptures. Given the physical immensity of Josephsohn's work, and their enormous presence, it would be difficult to privilege any other aspect! 

Josephsohn vue par Albert Oehlen
Installation View

The list of Josephsohn's references is diverse, including Egyptian funerary statues, Giacometti, Brancusi, Fautrier, styles and forms that are visible in the plaster and sometimes brass sculptures. The figures are moulded, pressed, developed by touch and pinch and squeeze. However, unlike his contemporaries, Josephsohn's sculptures are absolute, resolute figures in the world, taking up space in their particular environment, not about to move for anyone. The sculptures are also formally very different from the work of an artist such as Giacometti: Josephsohn's figures are formed by building up the surface, not attacking it and scraping in a search for perfection. They are also reminiscent of Rodin's oversized public commissions. Heaving figures, often leaning left or right such as late Untitled bodies and torsos reminded me of Rodin's Burghers of Calais, always dragging.

Josephsohn vue par Albert Oehlen
Installation View

At first sight, the forms are a complete mess: they are unmistakeably human, but the proportions of torsos, heads, and facial features are often skewed. The faces are particularly deformed, sometimes only a protruding triangle as a nose, a ridge beneath as a mouth is all we are given. And yet it is enough. We clearly recognize the human likeness. There is also a distinct difference between the male and the female forms. The male figures legs and torso are more defined than the women's. And however stopped the man is, he's often in motion. We do not always notice the details because the overwhelming sense that we get is one of loneliness and loss. Always, the figure is along on its plinth, even if it interacts with other works. Thanks to Oehlen's stunning curation, they form communities, repeated, always with a slight difference. 

Hans Josephsohn, Untitled, 2005

Contemporary artist Oehlen's curation is itself a work of art, emphasizing as it sets out to, Josephsohn's materials and the materiality of the figures. As I say, it would be difficult not to focus on the material because the plaster and brass are so sensuous. In many ways, the sculptures are about the material and the form that results from gouging, pitting, plying. It is as if Josephsohn is asking himself over and over: how can I push the material to create an extreme human form? We may even think of the sculptures as evidence of the artist thinking with his hands. Josephsohn has no interest in narrative, the difficulty of being human and living in history. Rather, he is enamoured with the plaster and brass. The figures are raw, rough, haptic, reminding us of volcanic rock. The deformed bodies that result say as much about how the artist sees beauty as it does his political or historical world view. 

Josephsohn, born in what was Königsberg, and is now Kaliningrad to a Jewish family, is said to have filled his sculptures with the tumultuous energy of growing up in Nazi Germany. This chaotic agitation and anxiety is literally present in the physical form resulting from manipulated material. Nevertheless, these works are still about the human hiding inside the material and the method of execution. Josephsohn's hands have a presence in their movement around the sculpture.  In the early works, the plinth is as important as human form, and then by the end the figure reaches such levels of abstraction that it becomes the plinth. As a result, Josephsohn's creations become monsters, gentle and warm, but deformed giants, nevertheless. 

Hans Josephsohn, Untitled, 2005

Noah Davis @ The Barbican

The Missing Link 4, 2013

Davis was one of those rare painters who could bring the political, aesthetic innovation, humour and poignancy, figuration and abstraction into a single frame. Davis's dexterous works exist in a difficult-to-place in between world, neither everyday reality, nor fantastical other worldly. The one thread running through all his work might be his commitment to the plight of invisible and marginalized people, evident in paintings populated by African Americans. But what is most striking is the way that Davis paints his figures. They rarely have discernible facial features, are typically shown in imbalanced frames or placed within fantastic narratives, in poses suggesting or depicting movement through environments, most often the street. And yet, we also see frames within frames everywhere in these paintings, the figures rarely feel entrapped, mostly because they are in motion. 

Pueblo del Rio: Arabesque, 2014

The face as the mark of identity and recognition of the individual is typically removed from Davis's black figures. Faces are erased, masked, veiled, blurred, splashed with paint, silenced through the removal of the mouth. The figures' facelessness makes them both individuals in a challenging world, and metonymical black figures in American history. 

40 Acres and a Unicorn, 2007

Another striking element of Davis's paintings is their surface. Beyond or in addition to the translucence created through his use of rabbit skin glue under paint and the scraping and washing of some canvases, surfaces are emphasized in scenes filled with reflections, squares and frames within frames. Drips, bleeds, shadows, cover urban streets and landscapes comprised of blocks of colour. This turns the backgrounds or space around the figures into areas as variegated and fascinating as the figures themselves. For example, in The Missing Link 4, a body of water in front of a modernist building captures the reflection of sky and concrete, merging with two figures playing. The texture of water and reflection is as compelling and curious as the housing project filling the upper two thirds of the painting. 

You Are ... 2012

Davis is one of those painters who begins from photographs and lens based media, mostly representing an interpretation of how black people are shown in these media. Several powerful paintings in the exhibition show the contrasts and constant flexibility and fluidity of Davis's paintings. Those beginning from anonymous amateur and family photographs find altogether different characters, relaxed, casual, at times exuding intimacy and connection. Other figures are isolated, alone, walking through worlds surrounded by painting and art, but unable to connect to other people. In 2012, Davis made a series of paintings inspired by midday trash television in which everything is constructed, stylized, and forced. These paintings, such as You Are ... are highly designed, the figures strategically placed, manipulated. Again, the figures are faceless, emphasizing the manipulations to staging, performance, and the cult of the TV personality and the de-individualization of the black participants.

Painting for My Dad, 2011

Davis's pictures can also inhabit the other wordly: in paintings such as 40 Acres and a Unicorn we see ghosts and unicorns. In others modernism meets black aesthetics and mysticism, in which impossible things happen, such as ballerinas performing at a housing project, and in a painting such as The Missing Link 1, a young boy levitates in a garden as other children look on. 

The Missing Link 1, 2013

Davis's references are wide ranging and eclectic. We see a man walking through an urban environment that resembles a Rothko painting, an exhibition curated at his own Underground Museum in 2012 titled, Imitation of Wealth referencing the Doulas Sirk film in which a black girl passes as white - in which a white woman has a moral breakdown, in which white culture distorts the self-perception of black people. There are also references to Mondrian and the geometricization of the image, Friedrich and the wanderer, though Davis's journeys in the night. Marlene Dumas, Peter Doig, Luc Tuymans are also also recognizeable in receding figures in ambiguous landscapes.

Untitled, 2015

While Davis's work is vast and diverse, intellectually rich, aesthetically innovative, and most significantly, committed to a politics of bringing unseen and unseeing people to visibility, as well as giving them the opportunity to see art, it's also extremely intimate. Viewers will sense the bond between three young men hanging out on a doorstep, surrounded by project housing, or two women asleep on a sofa. Perhaps most intimate are the paintings in which Davis himself is present, either literally as in a painting of his wife in a magic yellow costume or in a painting of a funeral in the distance, nevertheless within reach. It's impossible to see these paintings without noticing Davis's very personal spirit hovering around the walls. And it's impossible to see the exhibition without paying heed to the shadow of Davis's early death. As the exhibition presents it, the memory of Davis's art is clouded by death. 

Untitled, 2015

It's as though the fever to paint is so high as he approaches the end that he has to include everything he knows in his paintings. The history of art, the history of representation of black people, the way they are treated, pictured in images. Davis's body of work speaks to universal issues, and yet, is so intimate and personal about his isolation and the tragedy on its way to him. Leaving the world on his own, isolated, walking through a world covered in painting. And when he paints other people in the final works, they live together with art, their spaces literally taken over by paint, merged together with paintings on walls, paint dripping down onto the body, wiping it away.

Verborgene Schätze. Werke aus rheinischen Privatsammlungen @ Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

Gerhard Richter, Blumen, 1977, CR425-3

I braved the dead of German winter to travel to foggy Düsseldorf for this important exhibition of Gerhard Richter's works from private collections. I loved seeing many paintings in real life for the first time. In particular, a handful of early trompe l'oeil paintings, including Untitled (1966, CR701) and Small Door (1968, 210-4) were a treat. In these early works, Richter is clearly working out how to do what he needs to do. He will ultimately move on from the trompe l'oeil, but it makes sense that he was looking there to explore the specific questions of realism and illusion in painting that have concerned him over a lifetime. One of the exhibition texts claimed that Richter is concerned to pursue visual concepts. He is, but I would argue that the goal is more specific and more visual: Richter is searching for how to envision certain ideas about painting. 

Gerhard Richter, Small Door, 1968, CR210-4

Because the exhibition displayed works from private collections in the region, many of them were from early in his career, painted before he became internationally famous and the prices skyrocketed. While Richter made sculptures, mirrored works, and glass panels in this period, it was interesting to see that the people of the Rhineland chose to purchase paintings. That said, there was a small mirrored ball, however, it was exhibited as an object to be reflected on, rather than a reflective surface to create transformation in the room as his mirrored works are designed to do. There was one early sculptural work (Tube, 1965, CR59c), his only film (Volker Bradke, 1966) and some early self photographs, but the exhibition's focus was very much on Richter as a painter. 

Gerhard Richter, I.S.A, 1984, CR555

I have been looking at Richter's work for decades, but the exhibition reminded me of the sheer variety of his application of paint on the canvas. Of course, this is something that can only be appreciated when together with the paintings themselves, as opposed to seeing them in reproduction. It's not simply that he uses different tools - made visible through the density and path of the paint - but also that Richter uses a myriad of tools to apply paint in vastly different ways. Five small grey works from the 1960s and 1970s, each of which asks the question of "how can I apply grey paint to this canvas?" are a great illustration. Sponged, streaked, dragged, horizontally, vertically, or dancing across the canvas. The result is always different. Similarly, he asks the viewer to regard these differences, particularly, as the behaviour of light changes depending on the application of grey paint. Richter's paintings are always in motion, within the frame, in dynamic conversations with each other, and again with their viewers.

Gerhard Richter, Seascape, 1968, CR194-23

The importance of being together with the paintings was never more emphasized than when standing in front of the seascapes and alps which are among some of the most stunning of his grey paintings. In a Seascape such as CR194-23, 1968, the movement of the brush across the work is sumptuous. Here, Richter creates the line between sea and sky through technique and application of paint, but it's difficult to say where that line is. Something changes, but where on the canvas? We can say "here is the sea" and "here is the sky," but where the one becomes the other is unclear. This is in total contrast to other seascapes such as Seascape (Grey, Cloudy), CR241-2, 1969 with its artificial horizon line. Both paintings depict the enigma of the sea, abstracting it in opposite ways. 

Gerhard Richter, Seascape (Grey, Cloudy), 1969 CR241-2

Perhaps the most striking thing about the paintings on exhibition were the frames. As they are from private collections, the works are owned by someone other than Richter, and therefore, I assume that he has no say in how they are displayed or protected. Richter's paintings hold within them a complex discourse on framing; most often, frames within the paintings are removed, off-centre, in motion, or a subject recedes from the frame. Thus, a frame for Richter is something to play with, to remove, resist, pull away, to ensure his visual discourse on obscurity, transformation, and ambivalence. 

Untitled (Reddish), 1971

Untitled, 1966, CR70-a

When a hefty wooden frame is placed around a small abstract painting, it is trapped, shut down, its discourse on chance and motion removed. In frames added by collectors, Richter's works are forced to sit still like prisoners in an empty cell. The vulnerability and fragility of a small work such as Untitled (Reddish), 1971 is lost because it is no longer connected to the world, rather it is isolated when made precious and priceless objects. That said, when a work such as Pillow Picture (1970, 255-5) is hung next to Untitled, 1966, CR70-a which is captured inside an arrangement of no less than three frames, the Pillow Picture becomes luminous and perfect, its variegations brought to the foreground through comparison. The tender tiny painting pulsates with light, looking ominously like a television screen. There is an optical illusion here that would be lost if this little gem were placed inside frames.