Christoph Wedding               Tiefmalen                     17^th January - 28^th February 2009

Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard features “Tiefmalen”, Christoph Wedding’s third exhibition, from 17^th January till 28^th February 2009.

Christoph Wedding, a young German painter born in 1967, belongs to the abstract painter generation who returns to the source of painting consisting in a brushstroke on canvas. In his paintings, as it was a colored veil, Christoph Wedding paints a thin monochrome ground color. Then, using heavily paint-charged brushstrokes, he coats separate areas of the painting with thick colors endowing it with a raw complexion. Finally, he sports elliptical lines painted with a large paintbrush that overlay each other by their transparency and pile up or scatter on the surface of the painting. These lines are remarkable by their exquisite slenderness and buoyancy rendering them translucent. It’s only through their superimposition that their color is completely perceptible. The lightness and thinness powerfully contrast with the rough and substantial aspect of the previous delineation.

Christoph Wedding returns to the wooden supports, to mountings with curved angles, as well as humbler formats that allow a better densification of a very well thought out and meticulous pictorial work, combining gentleness and rage, emptiness and fullness, smoothness and texture. Consequently, one can better apprehend the title given to the exhibition “Tiefmalen”, a German neologism emerging from the combination of the words “to paint” (malen) and adjective/adverb “deep” (tief) and expressing the new pictorial language of an abstraction that aspires to a methodical exploration of the different possibilities offered by pictorial practices.

Christoph Wedding has participated in group exhibitions like Pilot Projekt in Düsseldorf, New walls from Europe in New York’s Tagore Gallery and What time is it at the Hedah Centrum voor Hedengaagse Kunst in Maastricht. In 2007 he was granted the Stiftungkunstfonds scholarship. His works are regularly presented at Art Basel, Art Basel Miami, Art Cologne, Armory Show and Frieze Art Fair.