CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.- The Art Institute of Chicago presents Focus: Magnus von Plessen, on view through August 31. Magnus von Plessen (b. Germany, 1967) is a remarkable young painter from Hamburg presently working in Berlin. He is a profoundly deliberate artist who imports a structured, abstracted vocabulary to the language of figurative painting. Over the past six years, Plessen has rigorously developed a distinct painterly style, emerging as one of the most accomplished, serious, and ambitious European painters of his generation. Although he is based in Germany—which is home to several emergent schools of new painting— Plessen’s practice is, to a significant degree, singular. Working alone in a canal-side studio with no artificial illumination (he paints exclusively in daylight) in the industrial Lichtenberg section of Berlin since 1999, Plessen focuses on various types of subject matter: formally sophisticated portraits, interiors, architectural configurations, and the occasional still life. His canvases vary in size from modest to increasingly epic, and his use of color runs from muted to lavish. His investigations in these various genres, scales, and tonalities reveal him to be an interested student of the history of European art—remarkably, though, he is largely self-taught as a painter.

Plessen’s earliest creative explorations centered on film, video, and photography, and he frequently uses found photographs and his own photography and video stills as a point of departure for his paintings. These records perform as catalytic references, not as literal sources. It is the process of remembering and forgetting, the transformation of the observed in the imagination, that shapes the artist’s painting process more than any single picture. Plessen describes his inspiration as coming from “inner images.”

More recently, he has begun to rely on drawing and painting from life, rather than photographs. The one work in the exhibition made in this manner—the eloquent floral still life Plant (2004)—suggests Plessen’s ability to locate the experimental potential embedded within a more traditional system of representation.

His painterly process relies upon a precise, controlled facture that is at once additive (paintbrush) and subtractive (rubber tool and palette knife). The breakthrough painting in this regard is Felicity (2002). With a brilliant economy of means, Plessen distills the figure to a perfectly flat sequence of lateral, monochromatic brushstrokes. All of Plessen’s subsequent canvases are built with a comparablycareful amalgam of discrete vertical, horizontal, and diagonal applications, alternatively thick and translucent, resembling bars: “The one straight stroke has to denote all that is supposed to be happening in the painting,” he says. Regarding Felicity, which he has at times called Felicity, 146 Brushstrokes, the artist states, “on one occasion I counted up the number of strokes in a painting. I was able to reconstruct the time in which the work had been painted. . . . It is not what I see that determines where I put the brushstrokes. They tend rather to follow a mental image of what I can touch. That’s what makes them so independent. But you can only do it in places; you can’t cover the whole painting that way. You can’t grasp hold of everything. The things you try to grab hold of slip away.” Plessen’s paintings, particularly those in a large format, have a palpable physical presence. The brushstrokes are tactile; one can imagine them as objects in their own right—molded apart from the painting, carried to the canvas, affixed to the surface, and later rearranged or removed like glued planks of wood or magnetized strips of metal. As such, his painting technique can readily be described as sculptural.

Plessen’s most recent body of work aims to reconcile a perceived tension between these various divergent modes of experience in his paintings: the interior and exterior, or the liquid places inside the painting and the solid, material reality of the world outside. One of the ways to trace his thinking in this regard is through the changing rhythm of his subject’s gaze. Among the major new works, the figures depicted in Self-Portrait with Someone Else’s Head, Group, Rider (small), and Rider (large) (all 2004) avert their eyes from the viewer.

Although nearly all of Plessen’s self-portraits picture him, as convention dictates, acknowledging the viewer, his most recent example, Self-Portrait with Someone Else’s Head, presents him in heavily shadowed profile, apparently reading. Here the change in concept is far more radical than tone, posture, or orientation. As the title implies, Plessen renders his own body—barely there—occupying someone or something else’s mental space. This suggestion of an uncanny corporeal grafting wryly posits the artist’s virtual absence from his own self-portrait; the controlling logic and agency belongs to the painting itself.

Organizer: Focus: Magnus von Plessen is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago. Support: The exhibition is funded by C. Bradford Smith and Donald L. Davis, with additional support from Judith Neisser and the Goethe-Institut Chicago. Ongoing support for Focus exhibitions is provided by The Alfred L. McDougal and Nancy Lauter McDougal Fund for Contemporary Art. Curator: James Rondeau, Frances and Thomas Ditmer Curator of Contemporary Art, Department of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago.