In 1965 Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) created his famous brushstrokes and thus transformed the subjective gesture of heroic modernism into a simple almost comic drawing, broadcast in large museum format.
The spontaneous movement of the brush on canvas has turned into a quote and the emotional exploration of intensity into a pop surface in the colors of the sign. The alleged immediacy of the expressive pictorial gesture thus became an ironic reflection on the medium of painting using the means of mass culture. This distanced and self-reflective approach had defined contemporary painting and the end of modernism ever since. He highlighted the fundamental elements of the image, such as the appearance of the colors and pigment, the color fields and their limits, and not least the application of paint in the form of a gesture.
This gesture had long since abandoned the direct expression of existence in favor of any number of
different discursive strategies and pictorial approaches. To this day, artists emphasize the problematic nature of the impact of color application and forever reinterpret it – from the gesture as a semiotic abbreviation for painting through the different transformations into images.
Starting with Lichtenstein's iconic brushstroke and outstanding single images by Gerhard Richter (* 1932) and Carl Ostendarp (* 1961) the exhibition Frozen Gesture at the Kunst Museum Winterthu opens up to a fascinating journey along works of art of high pictorial quality and exceptional visual appeal with contemporary artists including Franz Ackermann (* 1963), Ingrid Calame (* 1965), Bernard Frise (* 1954), Katharina Grosse (* 1961), Robert Janitz (* 1962), Jonathan Lasker (* 1948), Fabian Marcaccio (* 1963) and Judy Millar (* 1957) meet larger working groups of important Swiss artists such as Pia Fries (* 1955) , Christoph Rütimann (* 1955) and Christine Streuli (* 1975), supplemented by a contribution by Karin Sander ( * 1957).
David Reed (* 1946) is one of the most important contemporary proponents of abstract painting. The presentation of his so-called working drawings in the Kunst Museum Winterthur for the first time offers a concise overview of the drawings that come to the beginning of his creativity.
Cover image: (detail) Roy Lichtenstein 1923 – 1997 Feet yellow brushstroke, 1965
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein / 2019, ProLitteris, Zürich
