Frank Nitsche
“Turkish Delight”
April 8 - May 14
PİLEVNELİ | Dolapdere
Frank Nitsche “Turkish Delight” PİLEVNELİ Dolapdere April 8 - May 14, 2023
PİLEVNELİ is pleased to announce Frank Nitsche's first solo exhibition in Turkey. The exhibition titled “Turkish Delight" is an exhibition featuring the latest works of Nitsche, consisting of 31 oil paintings and a site-specific, installation spread across four levels of the gallery.
Art critic and writer Gerrit Gohlke sheds light on Frank Nitsche's art practice through the works featured in the "Turkish Delight" exhibition:
Modernism in architecture and art is a long history of straightening and simplifying. From the pitched roof to the flat roof, from ornament to pure surface, a geometry of practical constraint has come to prevail. The simple forms, once conceived as affordable beauty for the masses, were supposed to liberate us. In the meantime, optimized surfaces and strategic product designs dominate us with relentless efficiency. Frank Nitsche’s painting takes revenge on this monotony with disciplined pleasure.
For decades, he has been observing with forensic interest the forms that mold our environment. He collects the grotesqueness contained in Modernism. Nitsche creates albums, in an old-fashioned way on paper and with extreme precision collaged – in which, like a taxonomist, he collects the deformations left behind by our will to shape things. From the image of an accident to a scientific illustration, from a car wreck to a wanted poster, he doesn’t examine the historical course of events, but the visual trace that a process leaves behind. As a traveler on an expedition between the cultures, he brings home also typographies and advertising stickers, thereby producing the form typology of the global industrial societies: inventories of lines and curves, bodies and the relationships among them. The constant output of forms is the stock of types for a project that does not explain the world, because there are sufficient explanations anyway. He puts the world together anew.
For some time, Frank Nitsche’s paintings resembled architectures. Behind the surfaces, constructive components emerged, as if one could glimpse the interior of the geometries, as a surgeon sees into the fragile inner world of the organs. Then reduced circles, rectangles, and ellipses took possession of the better part of the canvases, as if, for their part, to bring the history of abstract painting to a head as a trademark. But at the same time, Nitsche’s work has inconspicuously yet constantly become ever more corporeal.
Every individual canvas is a process, congealed in paint, of lineation, contouring, overlaid surfaces, abrasions, tintings perceptible only on second glance, repeated overlayings, repeated sandings, twistings of the entire pictorial object, corrections, and reworkings. The surfaces await ideas that lend them meaning, even if their ultimate meaning will be that, as bodies, they assert themselves against the world from which their components were originally taken. It is as if, panel after panel and with utterly unbelievable, precise improvisations, an intractable individual, a tireless painter, wants to stoically maintain the aspiration for differentiation against all algorithms and artificial intelligences, social media and digitally supported design.
The multiple overlayings thereby give the canvases such a dense surface that they never succumb to the risk of mere constructive artistry. Each of them in itself stands across from the viewer, with a resistant skin of oil, but enriched with the legible traces of its production, hair- raisingly elegant, hardly reproducible in other media: measured out on a canvas, excerpts of a reservoir, always growing over the years, of re-combinable tongues and axes, curves and
circles, squares and arcs, edges and parallelograms. Nitsche’s pictures fearlessly seek proximity to comics
and icons. They profit from his profound training as a draftsman at the Dresden Academy. With artisan virtuosity, he appropriates pop- cultural signs that, however, ultimately always step back behind a painterly form decision that insists that our task is to deal seriously with nuances. These paintings hold up their own suspended counter-grotesquery against the panopticon of a world gone off the rails with its impositions and terrors. That is the source of their melancholy – and their irrepressible humor. Nitsche’s pictures unbendingly document the ability of the human gaze to resist the power of automatisms.
Frank Nitsche's solo exhibition "Turkish Delight" can be visited from 8 April - 14 May, 2023 Tuesday through Saturday between 10:00 am- 6:00 pm at PILEVNELI Dolapdere.
