Book

More about the book

On a brightly colored wave, the American painter Carl Ostendarp (*1961) has installed the exhibition of the Rolf Ricke Collection at MMK 2007 in Frankfurt, presenting his own paintings and those of his colleagues in a large-format two-tone wall piece. This "refreshes the way of seeing", decontextualizes the familiar, and decouples the works from anything closely related, thus allowing comparisons at a distance. His little artists' book 'Book' repeats this situation; now the viewers, however, are free to project their own imaginary selection onto Ostendarp's book(pages)walls. It might be his simple biomorphic forms, his words in bright colors, through which he merges, in a rather humorous way, Modernity, Pop, Color Field and Minimalism. Just as he explores the banality of everyday life in his own work, the wave extending across all pages - one edition in red, in the other in blue - also quite sarcastically raises the question of complexity in the simplicity of painting.