14.10 - 21.11.2009
Tuesday to Saturday, 11.00-18.00

Three Colours Berlin brings together three artists, all of them recent graduates of the UDK, who share a fascination with the expressive potential of colour in painting. It is the first show at the Matthew Bown Gallery, a new space in central West Berlin devoted to contemporary art.

Sarah Alexander's work references a kind of primal light: the light that is reflected from the white surface of a prepared, yet untouched canvas. The paint that covers this innocent surface is poured and knifed, thick and thin, opaque and transparent. A tension exists between the paint's organic inclination to sit still, or to flow unpredictably and the artist's interventions and decisions. Alexander's painting process is a kind of negotiation with natural forces. The light of the primed canvas surface is filtered by colour, or it is obliterated:
either way, she and we remain acutely aware of it.

In Johannes Bittmann's paintings, the colourful rhythmic structures of parallel bars of colour which stretch across his surfaces squeeze out pictorial space. They also squeeze out reference and narrative. The densely-worked surfaces suggest a history, but the only obvious one is the history of the painting itself. In one sense we are presented with impeccable modernist selfreflexive facts, not dreams. But colour in Bittmann's painting works at a threshold below that
of ordinary contemplation: it is felt as a kind of biological imperative.

Stefanie Kabitzke's many-layered paintings create a network of relationships. They are suggest something like a Venn-diagram that attempts the analysis of an impossibly complex organism. Her forms reference microscopic imagery, medical photography and chemical reactions; they exist in a unified, monochromatic, deep-hued colour-space. Her images seem to be partintelligence, part-body: endowed with preferences and antipathies, unsolved questions and pure pictorial statements, wounds and healing, intimacy and complexity.