by Sandro Droschl | For the German version, please click here.
Gerlind Zeilner is interested in the tensions and ambiguities within painting, including pictorial ideas shaped by a male-dominated art history that tends to the clichéd. In her structural significant and therein fragile, broken virtuosity, Zeilner works on figurativeabstract pictorial spaces full of critical and colorful suggestions about the existence of a female painter among male painters—of women among men. In convivial scenes of togetherness and shared experience in fictional Western and real artists’ bars, mostly heroic and overwhelmingly male gestures are called into question, in ways ranging from critical to humorous, by means of a special arrangement of color and forms and refreshing recast, for example, by engaging with paintings of bars in the work of the likes of Nicole Eisenman, Jörg Immendorff, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
In her more recent works, Zeilner has increasingly turned to inherent questions of painting and its relationship to drawing, since sketches often precede the paintings as drafts but also represent an autonomous and hence essential, substantial part of her oeuvre. Addressing the history of painting, its techniques, and its readings always plays a role in this, and she offers a very personal, specific answer to that. She extends this reflection to her own position as an artist, whether in her Studio Pictures in her immediate workplace or in impressions of urban scenes and architecture obtained while strolling that she assimilates subsequently, or in her Interior Pictures, which feature a perception that oscillates between real, fantastic, and psychological elements.
In this process, Zeilner adroitly plays with a kind of temporariness and incompleteness in painting, for which the New York writer Raphael Rubinstein has proposed the apt term “provisional painting”: “Provisional paintings are those that might appear unfinished or incomplete; that court intentional awkwardness, physical fragility and instability; that reject the display of conventional skills; that discover beauty in the most unassuming materials; that sometimes grapple with painting’s ‘impossibility.’”[1] Rubinstein is thus also asking about the possibilities of the medium that remain while continuing to insist on a potential impossibility of painting in whose potentials, supposedly restricted at the moment by the imposing, diverse historical evolution, the position of painters is becoming ever more precarious: “Faced with painting’s imposing history and the diminishment of the medium by newer art forms, recent painters may have found themselves in similarly ‘minor’ situations; the provisionality of their work is an index of the impossibility of painting and the equally persistent impossibility of not painting.”[2]
Rubinstein has in mind above all works in the first decade of the millennium by contemporary artists such as Mary Heilmann, Raoul De Keyser, Michael Krebber, Albert Oehlen, and Christopher Wool—who also appeal to me—whose reduction reveals a provisionality well suited to the meticulously open play with conception and composition in these works, not least in the sense of a critical attitude toward the production and representation of art and artists then common.
As historical reference points, Rubinstein evokes not only rather unwieldy and inherently somewhat homogenous-seeming positions as Martin Barré (1924–93) and Kimber Smith (1922–81) but also, at first glance somewhat surprisingly but with reference to his retrospective Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927–1937 (2008/09) at MoMA quite plausibly, Joan Miró (1893–1983), precisely in view of his ambition at that time to “destroy everything that exists in painting” [3] and his rejection of the idea of and desire for a selfcontained, enduring work of art. This, in turn, becomes clear in a sketchily broken, humorously collaged painting style with rather strong messages, for example, in Peinture (Tête) (1930), which, characteristically, shows a pink head without a recognizable face.
This is especially evident in Peinture (1930), which shows a schematically suggested body and, separated from it, (fragmented) elements and organs (presumably his own) such as a foot. Clearly, Miró was interested here not just and questioning and truly dissecting the medium of painting but also in isolating individual elements by drawing from new bodies that then become specific, that is, from distinct, surreal pictorial bodies. These paintings were produced at a time when fascism was emerging in Miró’s native Spain, and in their fragmentation support the individuals being attacked by the healthy, unified, fascistic body of the state, depicting their vulnerability, which could stand for personality, sensitivity, and humanity—and for the end of art that Miró was reflecting on. Already in Miró’s work, we see the conscious play with drawing and painting coming closer together, connecting, and, finally, fusing in a delicately balanced way, which lends the sketchy provisionality of Peinture (1930) its iconic fragility and mysterious manifesto-like quality by rejecting the historical superstructure of painting.
In Zeilner’s case, the provisionality of painting might have its origin in a similar intention from which the provisionality and sketchiness of the drawing that often precedes her painting and crucially influences her production. In Zeilner’s work, not formal connection results; drawing and painting remain separated. The drawing stands alone or provides a model for a painting; there are no direct interventions in the painting by drawing. And yet the paintings are striking drawing-like in their composition and execution, as if the artist were running an enormous oil pen brush virtuosically and coquettishly over the canvas and thus at times giving a broadly applied, colorful slip to her mostly male predecessors and their sometimes somewhat excessively interwoven designs.
Looking at her recent work Zucker (2020), we are struck by the broad, penlike stroke, which makes it easier to paint the work in one go. The painting looks to have been casually dashed off and, at first glance, unfinished; on closer inspection, however, it takes on contour, density, and content—and look: everything is there. But it also remains just a package of sugar, an everyday object to which we usually pay little attention—unless it is need or (worse) lacking at the crucial moment. Sugar is usually made from sugar beets; it was one of the first economic goods to be traded globally, and is a basic food in high demand; the glucose derived from it and other foods in the nutritional process provides the body with energy in the form of blood sugar. Its positive qualities can quickly be turned into negative ones: excess, lack, and mismanagement all of predictable consequences. Sugar is despite its simplicity universally useful, it thus is differently consumed, used, and processed individually, in everyday life and in art, and at the same time it stands as object (of sweet desire?) just alone and accordingly can be used in different ways, just as paintings can be read in different ways. Zucker (2020), precisely because it appears to have been casually dashed off, reveals the picture of a picture; a potentially diverse image becomes a concrete, specific one,—a painting—, which presumably precisely because of this ontological openness and incompleteness still bears within it the potential diversity of its meanings and possible uses but is always also searching for a social context—a subject, whether uncertain or self-confident—for its specific use and its interpretation.
In her paintings today, Zeilner does not depict bodies anymore but rather the objects, scenes, and situations that surround them, and yet even in their invisibility the people remain tangible as present outside of the image, as fragmented, fragile, searching subjects in complex times. Perhaps these subjects under pressure are, however, represented precisely by these stimulatingly unstable images and are captured well by them, whether as a suggested likeness or rather imagination of their bodies and organs as well as their potentials and actions. Does the provisionality of images not rather point to the provisionality and fragility of subjects?
Dear painter, paint me … a drawing-like drawing … or a drawing of painting … or (better still) a drawing of its subjects … a signature of its sign.
The clou of Zeilner’s drawn painting is the successive groping her way to questions about an iconicity and hence indexicality of painting as drawn, that is, marked but therein fragile, provisional image—painting, that is, as drawing of signs of its forms, renderings, stories, and subjects. The provisionality that Rubinstein brought into play appears to be astonishingly effective here precisely on the level of the imagination that continues the observation and— to use a word that has, not coincidentally, been unpopular for some time—almost designing, even though he, at least, presumably did not directly intend it to be. Zeilner is rubbing sugar into the wounds of painting and its diversely present subjects.
1 Raphael Rubinstein in the press release of an exhibition he curated: Provisional Painting, featuring Richard Aldrich, Cheryl Donegan, Angiola Gatti, Jacqueline Humphries, Sergej Jensen, Raoul De Keyser, Michael Krebber, Albert Oehlen, Julian Schnabel, Peter Soriano, and Richard Tuttle, at Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London, April 15–May 21, 2011.
2 Raphael Rubinstein, “Provisional Painting,” Art in America, (5 May 2009), https://www. artnews.com/art-in-america/features/ provisional-painting-raphaelrubinstein- 62792/ (accessed May 19, 2020).
3 Anne Umland, “Miró the Assassin,” in Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927–1937, ed. Anne Umland, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2008), p. 2.