Carl OstendarpBook

In 2007, at the MMK in Frankfurt, the American painter Carl Ostendarp (*1961) installed the exhibition of the Rolf Ricke collection on a garishly colourful wave, presenting his own pictures and those of his colleagues on an expansive two-colour wall work. This „refreshes the way of seeing“, 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 book(-page) walls. It could be his simple biomorphic forms, his words in bright colours, through which he humorously fuses modernism, Pop, colour field and Minimalism. Just as he addresses the banality of the everyday in his own work, 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 simplicity of painting.