Carl Ostendarp: Book

Colour on the side

In 2007, the American painter Carl Ostendarp (*1961) set up the exhibition of the Rolf Ricke Collection at the MMK in Frankfurt on a brightly coloured wave, presenting his own paintings and those of his colleagues on a large two-colour wall piece. This "refreshes the way of seeing", decontextualises the familiar and decouples the works from the closely related, thus allowing comparisons at a distance. His small artist's book "Book" repeats this situation, but now viewers are free to project their own imaginary selection onto Ostendarp's book (page) walls. It could be his simple biomorphic forms, his words in bright colours, through which he humorously merges modernism, pop, colour field and minimalism. Just as he thematises the banality of the everyday in his own work, the wave running across all the pages - in red in one edition, in blue in the other - also sarcastically poses the question of the complex in the simple in painting.