Carl Ostendarp: Greatest Hits

"Goofy signature letters"

Ken Johnson wrote in the New York Times in 2014 about Carl Ostendarp's works that they looked like someone burping in a church during a service. This admiring observation applies to the oxymoronological skill of the artist, who combines the incompatible: Loudspeak from the comic (which the NYT then calls 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 rather entertaining painting is his interest in graffiti, which he shares with many artists of his generation. Born in 1961 in the liberal college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, he lives and works as an art professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York - where Vladimir Nabokov once worked as a literature professor and had the later American cult author Thomas Pynchon as a student. Carl Ostendarp had his first comprehensive solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Heilbronn in 2017 - following cabinet exhibitions in 2011 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and 2007 at the MMK in Frankfurt am Main. This book retraces the exhibition at the Kunstverein Heilbronn and provides an overview of his work. For the large solo shows, he always realises room-filling murals reminiscent of landscapes, on which he places works on paper and canvas. The linguistic images that emerge before the viewer's eyes and, with their onomatopoeic distinctiveness, encourage visitors to repeat them aloud, floating between reading and looking - the thought of music and rhythm inevitably comes to mind: Looking and reading are thus joined by listening. The fact that words for pain (ARGH) or reluctance (ECH) are sometimes included here adds a critical note to the cheerful depiction, as Carl Ostendarp himself says that his installations seek to express the social, political and psychological sensitivities of contemporary society. In 2017, his preferred colour was grey, but this does not apply to his current wall work in Baden-Baden, which forms the basis of the presentation of the Burda Brothers' collection.

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