Christine Streuli

Christine Streuli's new series is a continuation of her installative painting practice which she showed in her recent solo exhibition "Lange Arme, Kurze Beine" at the Kunstmuseum Thun. The series breaks up the spatial grandeur of her painterly gestures into four small lithographic explosions of colour. The artist's intelligent and creative working process shows how painting can experience new levels, formats and forms of expression through planographic printing techniques.

Content, form and execution are mutually dependent in these works. The decisive factor is how the materiality of the painterly gestures is translated into lithography. Random and predictable traces are linked together in a skillful interplay between background and foreground. The artist develops coherent elements that run through all four works and also appear in altered form in her other work.

It is the digital and analogue layers that Streuli masterfully combines. She transforms the surfaces, splashes, stains and lines into miniatures of mural paintings that function like a window into worlds of their own. The new works have no representative elements and do not need them. They are encounters with the worlds of colour, gesture, movement and spatiality. The pictorial space materializes in Streuli's work as a host of sensory impressions that leave the beginning and end open. They are aesthetic formulations that escape the sayable, yet create their own language.

Christine Streuli has been a professor of painting at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2015. She represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Her most recent institutional solo exhibitions were at the Kunstmuseum Thun, the Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Berlinische Galerie.

After the serigraph "mural", the last work for the VFO, Christine Streuli has now created two new lithographs. In her works the artist often "plays" with symmetries, reflections and repetitions, with patterns and templates. The new works are less a mix of patterns than a sequence of layering and overlapping. Colourful loops, grey and coloured butterflies lie on an abstract, black and white background, and in the foreground, as optical bait, cherries on a stick. Behind these fruits, in both leaves, four white bars, like fingers, slide into the picture from the left. The prominently placed fruits are highly stylized - in their woodcut-like shape they all appear to be the same and each individual cherry has the same protruding highlight. The interplay of abstract and figurative motifs gives the lithographs by Christine Streuli a special, sensational dynamic.

What we get to see from Christine Streuli is not only meant for the wall (the work can be placed anywhere): the 7-colour serigraphy "mural" printed on strong cardboard. At the Venice Biennale in 2007, Streuli's works extended beyond the canvas. An allover of patterns and colours (and in it 14 monoprints) struck one in the Swiss Pavilion. The graphic for the VFO is smaller, but its presence easily fills a wall. It is a condensate that draws all eyes to itself. A green grid structure stretches over the reddish-orange ground (the complementary colours do their best), a green and white stripe pattern fidgets as if electrified over the sheet. There is no resting. This work is on its toes and keeps us electrified with form and colour. Adolf Loos ("Ornament and Crime", 1908) would have had his bright joy in it. The pamphlet against the ornament (especially in architecture) we left behind a long time ago. Thus Christine Streuli unselfconsciously creates a bulky, beguiling work with ornamental patterns - not for the sake of the ornament, but as a means to an end: to seduce us.

Christnie Streuli writes about her work: "My interest was above all in getting to know and acquiring a new technique that was still unknown to me: lithography. I was soon able to discover that she was the ideal working method for my painting. The sprayed, screened, painted and drawn forms on the one hand show direct interventions on the empty surfaces, but on the other hand, printed stone over stone and colour over colour, they give a very special appearance of artificiality. Such contrasts interest me. The tiger's heads inserted into the composition (sewn-on pictures from Chinatown) - juxtaposed to my free painting - additionally support this to and fro between immediacy and planned construction, between movement and rigidity, representational and non-representational."