Philipp Pflug Contemporary

Michael Pfrommer

Michael Pfrommer's paintings and drawings provide shells for spaces that our thoughts construct when we stand in front of them - and in a sense also face ourselves. Like a first fleeting, then fixating glance into a reflecting shop window, which flashes an intermediate world between the objects presented in front of us, the events behind us and our own temporary movement.

Pfrommer's pictures have a before and a behind and different pictorial grounds that do not quite agree with each other as to which of them has to take a back seat - and which succeeds in pushing itself right to the front. You can't see through them, and sometimes the pictures remind you of wallpaper, of a colored layer between the rooms that itself creates a room.

Newspapers, for example, also function here as material, a source of images and carriers of new pictures: a blanket of sea, a thicket of sturdy reeds. Streams of lava lash the columns, a wire mesh covers the folded pages. Printed daily and painted by the artist according to availability, the newspapers bring changing headlines, protagonists, places and events into the picture, which never become a direct theme in the painted scenes. The printed texts and photographs become structures of lines and windows that oscillate in the background of the gouaches, literally translucent, but never forming a coherent whole with the painted forms and figures. The contents become fleeting silhouettes, the events of the day an associative, thin pictorial ground. Detached from their already filled support, the layers of gouache, sometimes glazed, sometimes opaque, bring new forms to the paper.

The mutual independence and stubbornness of the pictorial grounds and motifs is characteristic of Pfrommer's work. There always seems to be room for something to be added or could be added if you look away for a moment and then look again. When you turn your gaze around yourself, just as you might turn a postcard in your hand and try to connect its two sides - only to realize that there are many possible, but no necessary, ways of reading the front and back together.

The pictures are full of ramifications and connection points for the everyday as it appears to us and follows us. They show the ordinary - everyday objects, urban and residential landscapes or media views of world events - and associatively lead us both closer to our own individual approaches to things and away from them and around the next corner.

Pfrommer's motifs are the result of a momentary collision between an environment that only appears to be external to us and the inner movements that we make towards it. Both wind around each other, entangling themselves and us in new situations and images in which the outside world shows an inner life and it is no longer clear who is looking at what or whom. Ellen Wagner

Exhibition
Michael Pfrommer
Sep 06 - Nov 02

Contact
Philipp Pflug
Berliner Strasse 32
60311 Frankfurt am Main

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mail@ppcontemporary.com