BAS VAN DEN HURK
There It Is. Just There.
Sep 6 – Oct 11 2014

1 Term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently traveled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto.
Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting that derived from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but “favored openness or clarity” as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style. As painting continued to move in different directions, initially away from abstract expressionism, powered by the spirit of innovation of the time, the term “post-painterly abstraction”, which had obtained some currency in the 1960s, was gradually supplanted by minimalism, hard-edge painting, lyrical abstraction, and color field painting.
2 In this text Joselit investigates the question of how a painting can belong to a network. The question was identified by Martin Kippenberger in the 1990s. According to Joselit this is ”the most important question to be addressed on canvas since Warhol.” See Joselit, David. “Painting Beside Itself.“ OCTOBER 130, Fall 2009. pp 125–134.
3 Successful collaborations will be based on a shared praxis. An important element of this is that collaborations will be either entirely experimental or entirely conceptual. The experience of modern art is consistent with this. All the core group of Impressionists – Monet, Picasso, Renoir, and Sisley – were experimental. All the Fauves, and all the Cubists, were conceptual. All the Abstract Expressionists were experimental. Johns and Rauschenberg were both conceptual, as were Richter and Polke. And finally, the larger and more complex the project and goals, the more likely artists will be to collaborate.
4 In his analysis of the nature of the contemporary condition, Groys posits that after the fall of communism – the last modern project – we no longer belong to this historical narrative, we no longer believe in this idea of an infinite future. We lose our time without being able to accumulate or invest it. We are in a period of infinite delay, of boredom, where the past and the future are constantly rewritten. This loss of an infinite historical perspective generates an excess of time. Groys argues that truly ‘contemporary’ art, reflects this contemporary condition, thematizing the excess of time and working as a collaborator of time, a comrade of time. Groys, Boris. “Commrades of Time.” Going Piblic. Berlin/New York, 2010. The title secondly refers to an exhibition series organised by Bas van den Hurk (www.comradesoftime.com)
5 A notion of Jan Verwoert in ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance’, a text published in: Verwoert, Jan. Tell Me What You Want, What You Really Really Want, Rotterdam/Zurich, 2010.
6 Graw, Isabelle. ”The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity, Indexicality, and Highly Valuable Quasi- Persons.“ Thinking Through painting. Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas. Frankfurt, 2012




  Bas van den Hurk, Ginerva Gambino, Cologne