Carl OstendarpBook

On a garishly colourful wave, the American painter Carl Ostendarp (b. 1961) installed the exhibition of the Rolf Ricke Collection at the MMK in Frankfurt in 2007, presenting his own pictures and those of his colleagues on a large-scale, two-colour wall work. This „refreshes the way we see“, decontextualises the familiar and uncouples the works from their close relations, thus permitting comparisons at a distance. His small artist’s book „Book“ repeats this situation, though now viewers are free to project their own imaginary selection onto Ostendarp’s walls of book (pages). It might be his simple biomorphic forms, his words in bright colours, with which he humorously fuses modernism, Pop, colour field and Minimalism. Just as his own work addresses the banality of the everyday, so the wave running across all the pages – red in one edition, blue in the other – also poses, sarcastically, the question of the complex within the simple in painting.