Carl OstendarpGreatest Hits

»Goofy signature letters« – Writing in the New York Times in 2014, Ken Johnson said of Carl Ostendarp’s works that they had the effect of someone belching in church during the service. This admiring observation refers to the oxymoronological skill of an artist who joins together the irreconcilable: comic-strip loudmouthery (which in the NYT becomes goofy signature letters) with cool Colour Field or Hard Edge painting (according to the NYT: high minded seriousness of the modernist monochrome). The background to Carl Ostendarp’s decidedly entertaining painting is his interest in graphic art, which he shares with many artists of his generation. Born in 1961 in the liberal university town of Amherst, Massachusetts, he lives and works as a professor of art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York – where Vladimir Nabokov once taught as a professor of literature and counted the later American cult author Thomas Pynchon among his students. In 2017 the Kunstverein Heilbronn mounted Carl Ostendarp’s first comprehensive solo exhibition – following cabinet exhibitions at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2011 and at the MMK in Frankfurt am Main in 2007. The present book retraces the exhibition at the Kunstverein Heilbronn and assembles an overview of his work. For his major solo shows he invariably creates room-filling murals reminiscent of landscapes, on which he places works on paper and canvas. The verbal images that arise before the viewer’s eye, whose onomatopoeic distinctiveness prompts visitors to speak them aloud, flicker between reading and looking – inevitably the thought of music and rhythm imposes itself: hearing thus joins looking and reading. That words for pain (ARGH) or aversion (ECH) sometimes appear here adds a critical note to the cheerful presentation, for in his installations Carl Ostendarp, as he himself says, seeks to give expression to the social, political and psychological sensitivities of contemporary society. In 2017 his preferred colour was grey, though this does not hold for his current wall work in Baden-Baden, which forms the basis for the presentation of the Gebrüder Burda collection.

Exhibition:
Kunstverein Heilbronn, 23/9 – 26/11/2017