Marten Kirbach

Working primarily on small formats, abstract visual worlds often emerge over long periods of time through a process that balances planning with spontaneous reworking, achieved through multiple layers of overpainting and glazing. The focus lies in questioning painting and its very means. Central to this is the exploration of pictorial space through color, light, and form, achieved through reduction and geometric simplification. It is a play with spaces and planes, with disruptions and shifts that repeatedly come up against the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. The influence of digital images, technology, and design finds its aesthetic expression here. Anything representational or narrative is deliberately avoided. Yet even as a distance is maintained from nature and its manifestations, a field of tension repeatedly opens up, allowing for associations and inferences regarding nature. Thus, echoes of landscape, figure, or interior emerge.

Through a series of steps involving the division of space, layering and separation, color modulation, the gentle linear dispersion of tones, and the use of overlays and semi-transparent coverings, a concrete visual narrative emerges, bathed in soft neon light. At times, these small-format paintings resemble precise, finely cut gemstones, each a perfectly balanced masterpiece in its own right. The works are characterized, on the one hand, by their love of variation and mutability, and on the other, by a simultaneous absolute formal rigor. It is from this contrast that Marten Kirbach’s painting derives its unique appeal.

Through the glazing application of multiple acrylic layers, tiering of solids drawn in perpective, and geometric colored surfaces – which are additionally dimensioned by means of a subtle contrast of light and shadow effects on the flat canvas, and so develops aconcept of abstractly indeterminate spatiality in his pictures. (...) The age of digitalization and the ›iconic turn‹ shapescontemporary perception habits and has supplemented them with visual experiences that were foreign both to classic modernism and abstract expressionism. Kirbach's works prove nonetheless how current the questions of artistic abstraction can be, particulary in a present charactzerized by floods of images from the media and virtually created »illusory worlds«. The conscious departure from the concrete, the internalization of the outside world and the expression of the inner self using color, shape, rhythm, structure and line, occur in this respect as a questioning of and a comment on – but in its statement consciously left open – reality experience of one's own present.