Markus Amm
Hanging Light
Herald St | 2 Herald St, London, E2 6JT
5th June - 3rd August
Herald St is pleased to announce Hanging Light, an exhibition of new paintings by Markus Amm. Taking place in the gallery’s East London premises, the presentation will feature a dozen works on gesso board, a support developed by the Geneva-based, German artist as part of an idiosyncratic and technical method of working carefully honed over the last twelve years. Hanging Light is Amm’s seventh exhibition at the gallery since joining its roster in 2005.
Amm begins each work by stretching canvas over a wood panel and building layers of gesso, sanding between each application. The resulting surface has a chalky smoothness, over which thin washes of luminous oil pigments are brushed and spread. An alchemic suffusion forms between the porous tableau and wet paint, eventually crystallising into swathes of colour passages which seem to swoop over and under and merge into one another. Amm’s practice has roots in collage and analogue photography, and he likens his process to the chemistry of developing images. There is a temporal element to his work, as the dozens of strata require drying, and waiting. The silky, light-imbued surfaces give way to dark scumbled crusts on the edges, sometimes polished and at other times left raw, revealing the artist’s hand and adding a sculptural dimension to the object-paintings.
Previously left untitled for over a decade, Amm has recently started naming his works. Like his compositions, the titles are not to be taken too literally – each piece sitting in a liminal space between abstraction and figuration, with ghostly forms sparking associations. Are we imagining the verdant fields, or the body parts, which seem to emerge from the blushes of greens or sensual reds? Amm describes the act of viewing his paintings as a game, a metamorphosis, or an activation. Schwarzwald (Black Forest) might evoke deep night skies cut through by ribbons of light, with a mossy ground murmuring below. Jazz Baby offers a warmer, more intimate glow, with scarlets and vermilions mixing in a smoky haze. In the titular painting, hot clouds float through a cold atmosphere of shifting ceruleans and periwinkles. The names are at turns floral, sharp, and aerial, adding an intensity and vibration to the works.
Amm intends the exhibition title to be taken primarily as an action, the image of hanging a light as a metaphor for his ritual of painting. In its original German, Ampel can also mean a traffic light, and is derived from the same word in Latin signifying the eternal light found in a church or graveyard. Diverting from his previous confrontations with pure abstraction, this recent body of work is infused with a new level of understanding, a mood dousing the sheets of gesso and films of paint patiently and attentively layered over time.
Text by Émilie Streiff