PAINTED! BEATE GÜNTHER, GUILLERMO KUITCA, RICHARD ALLEN MORRIS

Zurich: Daros-Latinamerica AG, 2009. color plates, cat., bio/chrons., appen., bibls., color pict. wrps., inside orange board portfolio with elastic corner closures. Painted! presents the uncompromising positions of three painters whose works have recently been integrated into the Daros-Collections. Over the past decades Beate Günther, Guillermo Kuitca, and Richard Allen Morris, deploying thoroughly different artistic strategies, have continually probed the boundaries of all that is possible in painting, each building an unmistakably autonomous oeuvre.They prompt the viewer to engage in a fundamental discourse with the potential levels of meaning and content that painting has at its command. Extraordinarily precise in their will to formulate, they understand painting to be an existential artistic means of expression and, with their works, set trenchant counterpoints to the usual salon painting of our day. Beate Günther, since 1984 a resident of Berlin, works with pigments. With them she creates a dense weave of the finest texture in the most diverse colors and forms, a surface marked by an exceptionally nuanced painterly richness. Subtle maneuvers in applying the paint lead to three-dimensional constructions on the canvas. The materiality of the pigments she applies allows her pictures to appear at times warm, sensual and lush, then again uncompromisingly cool and reserved. Despite their unambiguous, precise, and traceable form, her paintings disallow any hasty, thematic commitments, while remaining all the more open, dynamic, and flexible in their possible interpretation. The group of works Desenlace I-IV (dénouement/end) by Guillermo Kuitca (born in 1961), who lives in Buenos Aires, oscillates between somber and menacing violence, fragility and cool elegance. Powerfully pictorial, Kuitca orchestrates his four large-scale dramatic paintings, for which he has taken up the vocabulary of Cubism as well as that of the Argentine-Italian artist, Lucio Fontana. This provocative contribution to last year's Venice Biennale, where Kuitca represented Argentina, has a deeply distressing effect. It seems just too outrageous an experiment to delve into an art movement which already dates back 100 years, today. Kuitca stands up to the great masters of Modernism and compares himself with them, not without leaving permanent traces in the beholder. The Californian Richard Allen Morris (born in 1933) has lived in San Diego for years, well off the beaten track from the hectic international art scene. Disrespectful, bold, downright fresh and always full of painterly bravura, he transforms his own, sometimes bizarre world theater into painting. Playfully, humorously, and in his very own way, he reflects on the (art)world around him. His sharp observational skill, as well as his sense of irony and absurdity, lends his work its very special character. With no fear of an affinity to comics and caricature, Morris's painting amazes by its unalloyed freshness and spontaneity to this day. His works from the past 50 years span the entire artistic production of a painter who bubbles over with ideas. ENGLISH AND GERMAN TEXTS.