Carl Ostendarp: Book

Kienbaum Artists’ Book 2015

Kienbaum Artists’ books ed. by Jochen Kienbaum
40 p with a consistent two colored illustration
229 x 165 mm, hardcover

Red version:
ISBN 978-3-86442-113-6

24,80 €

Other versions of this title:
- Blue version, ISBN 978-3-86442-114-3

It’s color on the page

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.