03.09 — 04.12.14
devening projects + editions is very pleased to announce the opening of Different Every Day, Gerd Borkelmann’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
In his second project at devening projects + editions, German artist Gerd Borkelmann brings another selection of beautifully articulated works on paper. Initiated more than eight years ago, this ongoing project continues to result in evidence of this master formalist’s ability to stretch and reinvent his visual language. In Different Every Day, and for the first time, Borkelmann shows two large works on paper made specifically for the exhibition. These new pieces can be understood as a logical consequence of the previous work and closely related to the conceptual parameters and structural characteristic of the smaller drawings. What turns out to be compact and to have an immediate presence in the smaller works, shows up clearly as more painterly and atmospheric in the larger pair. The paintings appear as palimpsests; their compacted layers and overlapping webs frequently alternate between closed and open, transparent and opaque. Linear elements link with fields of colored surfaces to form a dense organic fluidity while at the same time creating an elusive and oscillating whole. The process of making is of great importance to Gerd Borkelmann. Developed over many sessions, the drawings undergo a deliberate process of editing, modification and resolultion — literally, different every day. The fundamental mobility and openness in Borkelmann’s work does not distinguish strictly between gestural and compositional ideas. Rather, the works suggest a kind of ambivalent state providing a range of interacting constellations where atmospheric color fields, lines and latticed structures shape unfinished tectonical, structural and pictoral space. Borkelmann’s works are abstract; they’re always on the hunt to arrive somewhere between escalating chaos and a reflexive regulatory system. In many ways, his work is driven by the medium-specific aspects of painting and its process; in other ways the work evokes various associative possibilities and a subliminally restrained expressivity.
Gerd Borkelmann has been showing his drawings and paintings since the early eighties in Europe and the United States. He has had solo shows at Galerie Dorit Jacob in Cologne, at the Kunstverein Peschkenhaus in Moers and the Museum B.C. Koekkoek in Kleve, Germany at the Galerie im Trudelhaus in Baden, Switzerland. In his 2009 show at devening projects + editions, he presented a selection of works on paper from an ongoing group that started in 2005; in total, there are more than 200 works in this series. His work can be found in collections of the Deutsche Bank, the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Duren and the Museum Kurhaus in Kleve. Gerd Borkelmann lives and works in Kleve, Germany.
