HAMBURG.- The Drawing Room kicked off the season with a group exhibition. Entitled Colour and Form, Imi Knoebel (born 1940), Rolf Rose (born 1933) and Henrik Eiben (born 1975) are showing a range of non-representational works on paper, in the form of a series or open-ended alignment. Something that all three artists have in common is their reduced vocabulary of forms and their exploration of the relationship between form, colour and space. Areas of colour are interwoven and layered and define the space on the paper with their rhythm, density and tension, as well as their playful lightness. All three artists are fascinated by the mutual relationship and dynamic of form and colour, their relationship to space and the dialogue between colour and light. They all deal with these themes using different media approaches.

For the works from the series Garden Pictures, Imi Knoebel has painted plastic sheets of foil with acrylic paint and then cut out shapes by hand, using a cutter, combining them on cardboard as collages. Cheerful works have emerged, with strong colours and a lively dynamic, which are more than simply a play with forms. Knoebel does not treat the garden as a (traditional) motif, as Max Liebermann did, for example, in his garden paintings, but as an abstract composition made up of seemingly arbitrarily arranged lines or strip structures, which can vary “infinitely”.

The watercolours by Rolf Rose—three horizontal layers of saturated colour gradations applied with broad brushstrokes—also trigger landscape associations in the viewer. However, Rose is primarily interested in a simple, harmonious and recurrent gesture, which corresponds to the watery, fluid state of the medium of watercolour and which takes shape through the movements of his hand and the paintbrush. The real subject of his works is colour and structure. In this way, the artist is able to use simple means to create highly complex works, which explore the basic requirements of painting: Colour, form, space, light and density.

The inexhaustible variation of the play of colour and form also plays a significant role in Henrik Eiben’s watercolours. His compositions of parallel undulating or interwoven lines and areas of colour that have been “breathed” delicately onto the paper, draw on Knoebel’s rhythmic “blocks of colour”. However despite the light and transparent nature of the paint application, the formal vocabulary is also reminiscent of the volume and plasticity of his own sculptures and wall objects.

The exhibition Colour and Form with works by Imi Knoebel, Rolf Rose and Henrik Eiben illustrates once more that the definition “abstraction” is difficult to apply to gestural, monochrome or geometrically oriented art because every artist begins the process with something representational and works on from there—in some cases the relations are more evident while in others they are less visible. The degree of abstraction is determined by the means of reduction, which creates a recognition value, or not, (see exhibition text by Oliver Zybok). The three artists challenge the necessity of creating an image, sound out the boundaries of what can be visually abstracted and seek the narrative expressive force of the non-figurative image.