Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to be presenting the first individual exhibition in an art gallery in Brussels of painter and Berlin resident Frank Nitsche, under the title ‘Disko’.
These new works see the German painter, born in 1964 and trained in Dresden, further radicalising his language of shapes. The familiar geometrical themes are stylised even more clearly than before. It is not the dominant areas placed in the centre of the canvas that stamp the individual picture: instead, Nitsche shifts the focus of attention to the deviations and variations within the professed formal vocabulary.
Nitsche thus asserts himself further as an analyst among the living German abstracts. His method does not draw primarily on the dispute with traditions in the history of painting, like the Informel, or the American Abstraction, but instead harks back to the analysis of everyday objects, and above all, media images. He lays out this source material in precise collages. From a journalistic image of a catastrophe to images of medical and scientific progress, he arranges his material in formal tableaux, using common illustrations to build himself a fund of the contemporary formal language, to which he opposes his paintings as commentaries and reflections.
Frank Nitsche has recently presented his work in the public domain in a location-specific installation at the BKV Potsdam e.V., thus underscoring the graphic relationship between his work and reality. What he is interested in is specifically not a painting style that relinquishes objectivity to liberate itself from perceptions or escape outer reality: Nitsche is far more concerned to use the confrontation with formal stereotypes of our daily environment to test the integrity of painting as a medium. Frank Nitsche is interested in the possibility of an autonomous counter-project to our world of products and commodities that is worked out down to the very last detail. So the singularity and determination of this experiment stem from the fact that his painterly counter-movement to the media’s flood of images is tried out and made available afresh with every new canvas.
