PAT ROSENMEIER

 

Nine Gold - Nein Gold – Kein Gold?

Nine Gold — Nein Gold — No Gold? It has now been almost three years since my first encounter with Pat Rosenmeier’s paintings, and my admiration for this still young artist remains unbroken. The possibilities of art are becoming more and more diverse and — taking into consideration the work being done across the continents — the possibilities and the responses offered within the discipline of painting are also defined by an almost incomprehensibly broad diversity. It has thus become all the more necessary to differentiate among the particular aims that lead artists to take up the brush and to give names to their motifs, overlaying them with corresponding filters, which make comparisons — and, with them, evaluations — possible. One very substantial distinction is the question of thematic vs. formal motivation. Does the painter want to tell us a story, is the work about a narrative or a theme, such as portrait, landscape, etc., or does the interest in painting articulate itself based on the possibilities immanent to this discipline, the engagement with painterly predecessors and their legacies and the question of what is still left, what has not yet been painted and how does this picture need to look in accord and correspondence with a progressive visual changing of the world.
Pat Rosenmeier clearly belongs to the group of painters who have taken questions directed to painting as the focus of their interest. This becomes plain in the countless references reflected in her subtitles: Füssli, Bleckner or Rembrandt.
The subtitle of one of the paintings from the Nine Gold group of works documented here is Späher (Scout), which is a reference to a figure from the pictures of Neo Rauch. In addition to allusions to the history of painting, other subtitles also establish associations with pictorial structures or surfaces (Mars) or literary sources, as in the case of Black Black Beauty, which is based on the novel Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse, written by Anna Sewell in the 19th century and adapted for film multiple times. Modelled entirely in thick layers of black, this unphotographable painting recalls the play of a black horse’s muscles, which reveal themselves only when the light changes or in movement. However, because paintings are unable to move, viewers have to shift their point of view to decipher the secret of this painting.

The title Nine Gold reveals another, humorous side of the artist, which seems to enjoy associative plays on words, like those familiar from Jake & Dinos Chapman. The series Nine Gold consists of eight identically sized paintings (Acht Grau [Eight gray], Gerhard Richter, 2002, sic), one of which — that is, Black Black Beauty — is completely black. Gold blackens when oxidized. In her own sequence of associations, Pat Rosenmeier mentions Glen Gould, Nan Goldin, Nein Gold, Kein Gold, rein Gold, Rheingold.

We are happy to have hosted the German-Canadian Pat Rosenmeier, who was born in Stuttgart, as the first recipient in our “open studio” program. We were also fascinated by her extraordinary knowledge and reflectiveness with regard to important artists and key works from the history of art, which she uses to construct arguments in her pictures.

My special thanks goes to our two authors, Jan Hoet and Frank-Thorsten Moll, who concentrated on different aspects in shedding light on her work, thus providing a well-informed approach to it.

I would like to thank Mario Strzelski, who represents Pat Rosenmeier at his gallery in Stuttgart and has been of great assistance in numerous organizational and logistic matters. He allowed us to use Klaus Mellenthin’s outstanding reproductions of the works and, in Christian Steeneck, he also selected an exemplary designer for this catalogue. We ultimately owe the artist’s stay in Stuttgart to Mario Strzelski’s words of encouragement on our behalf.

Last but not least, I thank the BW Bank and its chairman, Jochim Schielke, for generously supporting this publication.

Veit Görner Chairman of ARCHIV e.V.