Lot 127: Nitsche, Frank 1958 Eisleben HUK -03-2004.2004.

Nitsche, Frank
1958 Eisleben

HUK -03-2004.2004. Oil on canvas. 200 x 175cm. Signed, dated and titled on verso: HUK -03-2004/Nitsche.

Provenance:
Gallery Max Hetzler, Berlin (exhibition label on verso).
The business of painting urgently requires an internal audit. Instead of a business-motivated history of styles on the basis of which the personal style of the painter producing the asset can be analysed like a value-guaranteeing watermark, the question should be posed: What does the act of painting actually leave for the beholder? What do the things the beholder observed in the painting have to do with the painting's previous history? Only a few works of contemporary painting are as well prepared for a New Objectivity of reflection as Frank Nitsch's abstracting extracts of grotesque everyday forms. Actually his large paintings are not decorative inventions made of randomly combined colours and forms, but architectural structures made of the waste material of society's image and design industry. The painter maintains an archive that resembles a medial recycling depot. A recycling hall of the curious into which all those ephemeral distorted images, spectacular snapshots and voyeuristic exposures enter with which image editors and documentarians fill the centre spreads of journals and newspapers. Frank Nitsche keeps more of a cartographic diary where the chaos of the ugly, the monstrous, medial stupidity and dishonest exaggeration, technical hybrids and physical pomposity find an order of their own. His atlases of the spectacular kept in classic photo albums consist of collages in which the excess of exaggerated imagery - carelessly published by editors and marketing agents - is mounted in a strict caleidoscopic pattern that - press-clipping by press-clipping -, assigns yesterday's illustrations a distinctive and formally legitimated place. (Gerrit Gohlke, in: Frank Nitsche, Cologne, 2006/2007, unpaginated).