Opening: May 15, 2021

Laura Aberham renounces all representationalism in her paintings. She radically exploits a kind of colour field painting to a point where only the individual colour itself, its interplay with others and the recognisable application of paint have meaning. The paintings sometimes develop a dynamic that almost leads to a colour frenzy. Her works, especially the large-format ones, have a performative character. With this dynamism and wild movement, the viewer is not confronted with a closed pictorial composition, but with an open “working field” that shows the traces of the application of paint and clearly reveals drops, traces of material, overlays and layers. And yet the compositions of the individual parts of the picture are very precise and well-considered.
Such a concept is radically opposed in Sophie Heinrich’s paintings, in which a strict concentration on the linear is substantial. In addition to the planes, the lines are of pictorial importance. Large unpainted areas of the canvas are often included as compositional elements and pictorial colour. Every single setting, every stroke, every line, every surface is pointed. For she is not only interested in the precise composition within a painting, but also in the reference of individual elements to other paintings. Thus, time and again there are tableaus that are assembled from several, sometimes large-format canvases into one picture.