Texts on the Exhibition Ingvild Goetz A Personal View Gregor Jansen The Final: Defined or Definitive! Imagination Becomes Reality Stephan Urbaschek Images are generated by a gaze searching for new and personal insights. They are images of those gazing at the world. Peter Weibel On the Interaction of Painting and Other Visual Media Ingvild Goetz: A personal view I am personally interested in the ways in which painting is interacting with a wide variety of media. This alone was reason enough for me to address the issue of this controversial medium’s place and potential in contemporary art, not by organizing exhibitions in a conventional sense, but by focusing on the presence of painting in other media and its effect on the full range of current artistic practice. The present exhibition is devoted to artists whose work crosses the frontiers between various art forms and inhabits the area where they intersect. Film and installations using film play an important part. Paradoxically in a show focusing on painting, the film elements serve to clarify certain aspects, incorporating approaches derived from painting and providing today's painters with significant impulses. I devised the series of exhibitions Imagination Becomes Realityin order to examine painting's current role, dividing the subject into five main themes, each addressed in a separate show in our small museum in Munich. One of them investigated painting in relation to architecture and space, including the non-concrete spaces of the imagination, and discussed the role of the viewer. Space and architecture have always played an important part in painting. Today this is perhaps truer than ever because of the intense dialogue between architecture and painting and of changing attitudes to time and place occasioned by concern with virtual space. Unlike the natural sciences and philosophy, art tackles these issues either in purely formal terms or in relation to the nature and the position of people in space. Painting has created imaginary spaces for a very long time, but ultimately nearly always in connection with people located in space or with space as a metaphor of people's location in it. [...] Excerpt from the Catalogue Imagination Becomes Reality Conclusion Gregor Jansen: The Final: Defined or Definitive!Imagination Becomes Reality What is an image? This question has been asked countless times and answered even more often. Always linked to issues concerning reality and its models, it is seen as a criterion of cultural significance. Beginning with the ban on images in some religions, the power of images has given rise to a whole series of ongoing problems. Images attract us - as a way of transmitting knowledge, as imitations, as entertainment, as fantasy worlds, as proof of statements, as desires come true. In quite general terms, and perhaps more than ever before, images are today affected by reception over long periods of time and at high speed, by a crisis of representation, and, not least, by the difficulty of criticizing them in the context of a pervasive, hysterical aesthetics of attention-grabbing. Few visual media have enjoyed such prominence in the history of human culture - in the church, say, or in art - as painting, particularly easel painting, and few have been eyed so critically over the past hundred years. Since the invention of new media for storing images - especially photography - the continued relevance of painting to visual art has constantly been doubted. Outright resistance to it began in 1914 with Marcel Duchamp and Aleksandr Rodchenko. The latter actually switched to photography in 1925, while Duchamp, whose previous work had been dominated by painting, turned his back on it and developed conceptual art, propagating absolute freedom in the choice of media best suited to transmitting ideas in the most convincing formal guise. [...] Excerpt from the Catalogue Imagination Becomes Reality Conclusion Stephan Urbaschek: Images are generated by a gaze searching for new and personal insights. They are images of those gazing at the world. The sixth and final installment of the exhibition series Imagination Becomes Reality, on display at the ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst in Karlsruhe, consists of 225 works by fifty artists from a variety of countries. (...) The additional items are paintings, photographs, installations, and videos by Hans Op de Beeck, David Claerbout, Brice Dellsperger, Loretta Lux, Fabian Marcaccio, Jacco Olivier, Raymond Pettibon, Lari Pittman, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Xia Xiaowan. They all embody approaches in tune with the goal of the exhibition series: to show how current attitudes to images have enriched and extended the boundaries of contemporary painting. The exhibitions originated in the observation that painting had yet again risen like a phoenix from the ashes of its frequently predicted demise and in recent years had experienced an almost unprecedented boom throughout the art world, a status reflected in the number of shows devoted to it by museums and galleries and in the prices paid for it at auctions. In the exhibitions she curated in Munich, and in her collaboration with Gregor Jansen, head of the ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst, collector Ingvild Goetz has aimed to show that painting, or at least strategies based on painting, never died. Photography, video, and, not least, the computer have simply changed those strategies and incorporated them in their own medium. [...] Excerpt from the Catalogue Imagination Becomes Reality Conclusion Peter Weibel: On the Interaction of Painting and Other Visual Media The primary source of visual images is nature. In this visible world of nature, the visual element apparently exists without needing a canvas. After all, we can see the world with the naked eye. It was only the development of the fine arts that localized the visual element and attached it to paintings and other visual media. Once we discovered the most prominent portrayal system in paintings, we wrongly became accustomed to equating the notion of the visual element with this art. In reality, these pictures are only a small part of what makes up the universe of the visual element. The visual world is more comprehensive than the world of painting. The visual world is what is visible, which exists unmediatized as well. Pictures are mediatized both by the support media (canvas, panel, wall etc.) and the technique used (brush, oil paint etc.). In the course of our cultural history we have accepted such pictures as second nature and therefore equated them with the visual element. But the more the visual element has migrated from pictorial medium to pictorial medium - which started with the appearance of photography (c. 1840) and continued with more recent technical visual media such as film, video and computers - the more the concept of pictures became distinct from any exclusive visual medium, so that it became increasingly clear that the visual element is not associated solely with the idea of a picture. Even in panel pictures, the visual element was there just for the ride - a passenger in a 'passage de l'image'. [...] Excerpt from the Catalogue Imagination Becomes Reality Conclusion