Menhir Art Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Miart 2022 in the “Established” section with an exhibition project entitled “The Opaque Surfaces of Analytical Painting,” which retraces the historicity of the movement and its revolutionary and reflective approach, presenting works by the most important European artists who were part of it.
Analytical: from the Greek analytikḗ (tékhnē): the art of breaking down.
Starting from the etymology, we believe that each of us can immediately form the foundational image of Analytical Painting. From its very meaning, and by placing the Movement between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s—years in which painting was re-founded, decomposed within itself in relation to the alternative and new languages that artists were determined to explore in the early decades after World War II (Action Painting among others)—we can imagine and understand how the Movement reclaimed its place as a specific linguistic field, after a laborious search for its own “zero degree,” becoming part of this process of reconstruction.
It was a microcosm among many similar ones, which today—forty years and more since its trajectory—stands out within the context (that of the time) of the rebirth of painting, then rather nebulous and defined as the era of New Painting.
Analytical Painting was one of the many denominations of New Painting, and it was the only attempt to provide a precise definition, referring to a small number of artists united by specific characteristics not found, or not predominant, in others, along a defined geographical axis (an international axis—truly rare for those years).
Together with Transavanguardia and Arte Povera, these were Groups and therefore Movements that made exclusivity one of their founding features. Before being defined as such, however, it went through an extended process of definition, shaped by an intercontinental path (from Filiberto Menna’s notion of the Analytical Line of Modern Art in 1975, to the signals from the 1967 group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, to Joseph Kosuth’s 1969 text Art After Philosophy, to the title of the exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York in 1966, among others), contributing necessarily to a definitional process: Painting-Painting, Pure Painting, New Painting, Systemic Painting, Opaque Painting.
Each new definition corresponded roughly to a new exhibition. However, most of the painters involved rejected—or even opposed—every classificatory intention
(IONONRAPPRESENTONULLAIODIPINGO – as one of the artists defined his own work).
The various currents (which saw intense, turbulent, and powerful histories) and their respective artists were:
the American one, in which Berthot and Robert Ryman worked
the English one, in which Alan Charlton, Robyn Denny, Alan Green, and David Lettermann worked
the Belgian one, in which Piet Teraa and Dan Van Severen worked
the French one, in which Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, and Toroni—officially united under the acronym BMPT—worked, as well as Supports/Surfaces, in which Dolla and Viallat worked
the Dutch one, in which Rajlich worked
the German one, in which Georg Baselitz, Penck, Richter, Girke, and Winfred Gaul worked
the Italian one, in which Claudio Verna, Carmengloria Morales, and Gianfranco Zappettini, among others, worked
All together, they contributed to the construction of this reflection on the language of painting, this desire to return to canvas, stretcher, and color, this distancing from expressions such as Informal Art and Pop Art, which dominated the German collecting market, and from an international climate that, at the beginning of the 1970s, appeared discouraging.
Thus was born Analytical Painting, which Klaus Honnef decisively identifies as “a new development in the history of art” with new questions never before posed in the history of painting, so long as its language remained comprehensible. It was celebrated in Italy from the very beginning by Galleria Peccolo, Galleria Bertesca, and Galleria del Milione in Milan.
Canvas, color, material, content, substance, subject—these were its core concepts.
Firmly set between two sculptural movements—Arte Povera and Transavanguardia—and today clearly identifiable (its substance and its line of reflection between the two movements now evident), it has returned to prominence over the past twenty years, thanks also to the valuable work of the Zappettini Foundation (whom we thank for some of the historical and informational materials provided). With this special project at Miart—stemming from research begun in 2013—Menhir Art Gallery celebrates its supranational and pan-European aura, the parallelism between Painting and Linguistics, its essence, and its depth, through some of the most significant works by the founding artists of the Movement.
ARTISTS ON VIEW AND SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Mr. JAAP BERGHUIS, born in Smilde (Netherlands) in 1945. He lived and worked in Amsterdam (Netherlands), where he passed away in 2005.
“When you try to build a state of mental concentration for future paintings, it is the most difficult moment. It is a kind of painting that emanates; you cannot see yourself consciously while painting, even if you control the act of painting, you cannot correct it. As long as you do not lose contact with the painting, everything goes well. When you begin to look with consciousness, then you lose contact.”
Mr. ULRICH ERBEN, born in Düsseldorf (Germany) in 1940. Lives and works between Düsseldorf (Germany) and Bagnoregio (Italy).
“The colored surface could have evoked associations: white replaces color. And I wanted to move away from associations, away from the object. This had nothing to do with conveying philosophical considerations. I use white as a neutralizing element and as a non-color. I could no longer use green without thinking of a tree.”
Mr. WINFRED GAUL, born in Düsseldorf (Germany) in 1928, where he passed away in 2003.
“What are the materials of painting?
Color, canvas, stretcher. If today I prefer poor materials in painting, if I prefer raw canvas instead of a gold ground, and if I use cheap school chalk, or children's paints instead of expensive artist colors, it means only that, at this moment, these materials are the ones I prefer for my work. The decision for or against a material must be seen as part of a process we call painting.”
Mr. RAIMUND GIRKE, born in 1930 in Heinzendorf/Niederschlesien (Poland). He died in Cologne (Germany) in 2002.
“Decisive elements in the working process are the materials: they require specific approaches that must remain intelligible. The sequence of brushstrokes, suited to the size of the surface, creates a more or less animated field, and the connection between successive layers of paint—almost indistinguishable from one another—results in an almost homogeneous tonality and extraordinary density and intensity of color.”
Ms. CARMENGLORIA MORALES, born in Santiago, Chile in 1942. She has lived in Italy since the early 1950s, with long periods spent in New York and London.
“I am always interested in controlling perceptive and perceivable boundaries. This reflective attitude toward the implicit potential of my language leads me to a need for analysis of the (most objective) internal structures of painting and their articulation according to pure, fundamental relationships.”
Mr. TOMAS RAJLICH, born in 1940 in Jankov (Czech Republic). After more than 40 years in the Netherlands (following the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia), since 2010 he lives and works in Prague and in Italy, near Verona.
“The grid in my paintings has a double meaning: at the beginning of my work it still gave an impression of spatiality; optically, the effect of space seeped into the canvas, which for me was wrong. Everything must happen on the surface, and I began working away from spatial illusions: that is why the grid remained.”
Mr. RUDI VAN DE WINT, born in 1942 in Den Helder (Netherlands), where he passed away in 2006.
“Two problems arise within me: formal principles and painting. I start from anonymous formal principles such as the diagonal, symmetry, the golden ratio, composition (in still lifes), the figure in space, and aesthetics (in color reconstructions). Furthermore, painting is enriched by the rhythms of the anatomical structure of color, which is almost devoid of identity. The most ambitious goal is a void of identity.”
Mr. GIANFRANCO ZAPPETTINI, born in 1939 in Genoa. Lives and works in Chiavari (Genoa).
“I turned toward poor materials, discarding a priori the traditionally more noble ones, so that my making—stripped of every possible condition of privilege—could assume the character of anonymity-work. The roller fulfills this function and becomes the specific tool of this making; indeed, while the ‘brushstroke’ tends toward gesture, toward autobiographical connotation, the roller does not produce a ‘gesture,’ but rather an impersonal, unrecognizable, uniform ‘movement.’”
Fieramilanocity, Viale Ludovico Scarampo - 2019 Milan | Pav 3 - Stand B138