Nick Oberthaler. Eventuality of an Attempt / Sara van der Heide. Claim to universality. Color theory exercise 1-20

11.02.2012 - 25.03.2012

KIOSK, Gent / België

Nick Oberthaler’s show Eventuality of an Attempt integrates works on paper, sculpture and a cruciform spatial intervention in KIOSK’s architectural landscape. In this very specific architectural context, Oberthaler thus tries to attain an abstract and pure spatial experience.


Sara van der Heide presents a series of twenty watercolours under the title of Claim to Universality. Colour Theory Exercise 1 – 20 (2011-2012). The series is based on a drawing by Lena Bergner, made in 1927. Bergner was a student of Paul Klee’s at the famous Bauhaus.... An unorthodox institute for art education, the Bauhaus developed influential theories on art and design and also promoted a certain way of life. The school was founded in the German Weimar Republic, on the eve of the national-socialist era. In 1933, the Nazis closed the by-then mythical Bauhaus. They claimed it produced ‘orientalist cubist forms that belong at the edge of the desert’ and that it was a home for ‘Bolsheviks, Jews and other inferior races’, as Hans Severus Ziegler wrote in 1934.

Lena Bergner’s original drawing is titled Belichtung/Beschattung and shows a small circle in the upper left from which several rays of light and colour start, to fan out in a larger circle. In her twenty variations on Bergner’s drawing, Van der Heide sets out to examine the fundamental characteristics of watercolour painting: colour and light. Her works are presented in the cabinet adjacent to KIOSK’s dome room, in a horizontal band interrupted by the window and doorways. The drawings are hung so that together, the rays of colour and light form a waving line. The space between the colour exercises is also charged with ‘cosmic energy’, an important concept in Paul Klee’s methodology, pointing out that art and nature spring from the same source and are both part of a greater, cosmic whole. Klee did not just want to show the visible material world, but also the intangible: the world of ideas, art. Or, as Klee wrote himself, in his Creative Credo of 1920: ‘All being is based on movement ... And likewise in the universe, movement is the basis of everything. Peace on earth is an accidental congestion of matter. To take this congestion as basic is mistaken ... The work of art, too, is first of all genesis; it is never experienced purely as a result.’

[Quelle: kiosk.art, 11.01.2022]

The series of drawings consists of layered wholes of Indian ink, wax, pastels, watercolours, gouache and sparingly used photographic fragments. Oberthaler prefers paper to canvas. In its delicate receptivity, the paper surface bears the traces of different techniques, gestures and moods. Oberthaler approaches painting as just one of many possible forms of expression, and in his finishing, too, he does not aspire to a single style: balancing between a muted and a nearly luminous colour composition, between a smooth, final texture and a tentative, tactile draft, he seeks out the nebulous space between the strictly rational form and the incomplete, possible form. Oberthaler usually starts with the traditional scheme underlying the pictorial representation of landscapes. Horizontal lines slide through several of his abstract geometric designs like a limitless horizon in a landscape.

This line, as well as the format, the cruciform partition and the colour of Oberthaler’s works on paper, is extended throughout the entire exhibition space. The cruciform wall structure of gypsum board in the central dome room creates a new, sculptural focal point that integrates four equal spaces. Each of these is autonomous and is also treated as such. Some of the walls become surfaces for rhythmic colour blocks and lines, others remain plain. This background converges with an assemblage of works on paper, delicate steel sculptures, mirrors and an enlarged print of the last page of French writer Charles Juliet’s book Rencontres avec Bram van Velde. The undefined colour surfaces imply a certain depth and the mirrors offer an expanding window onto what is ‘hors-champ’. This three-dimensional pictorial representation is positioned in space like a folded sheet of paper, exploring the material and the spatial boundaries of the medium.

Eventuality of an Attempt is like an abstracted representation of a metaphysical, subjective landscape: a grey cloud study, a sunset over the sea, a paleness in the perception of colours at nightfall and, eventually, a vanishing point, with the moon as the centre of the world. Painter Bram van Velde, already mentioned, might well have said that Oberthaler’s ‘window still life’ does not simply offer a view of the world outside, but that above all, it stares right back at us from the void, like Narcissus losing himself in his own reflection. With German romanticism at the back of his mind, the artist expresses the desire to attain a similar level of sublime complexity through reduction. The exhibition’s title points out that neither the attempt nor its goal is unique, stressing instead the openness to the attempt and to doubt—as if the exhibition space was just a studio, basking in the low winter sun.