Klaus Jörres 15 1.05.2015 – 20.06.2015 EN DE Lars Dittrich & André Schlechtriem are pleased to announce the gallery´s second solo show of Klaus Jörres, titled 15. Six minimalistic paintings with the format 200 x 150 cm offer a dialogue between flickering nuances of white and the analytical clarity of filigree lattice structures: An aesthetic of a monochrome difference, a confrontation of geometrical essences. The untitled canvases show optically challenging systems next to sensitive surface-formations with a tendency towards a somatic perception. Jörres formulates a minimalistic reality. It gains its energy from the tension between calculation and contingency, between the visual dynamic of computer-generated templates and the haptical presence of the objects. “In the recent black-and-white and white-in-white pictures […], [Jörres] […] has done away with the colorful graffiti-like wavy lines and additions in sans-serif typefaces. With their austere geometric formal vocabulary and the occasional sudden shift between line and surface, the works revolve around the question of how far the pictorial narrative can be silenced within the picture’s chosen aesthetic framework. Taken up by slightly offset more or less regular vertical and horizontal grid lines, the […] canvases […] —some of them are linked by formal correspondence—may be read as exercises in the elimination of language. […] ‘Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.‘ (Rosalind Krauss: Die Originalität der Avantgarde, S.51). […] In the contemporary perspective, the selfreferential nature of Klaus Jörres’s paintings appears as a form not of isolation but of concentration. They are architectures in which the fragility of the rationalist spirit of the era flashes up, perhaps even allowing us to intuit the matrix that underlies it. The arbitrariness of the grids is open to modification. There are no hermetic systems, not meaningless grids and surfaces. To crack them open remains a task that artists face again and again.” The above excerpts from the essay „Less Narrative, More Protocol“ by Berlin-based art critic Kito Nedo are featured in the full exhibition catalog currently available at the gallery. Klaus Jörres (Düren 1973) has lived and worked in Berlin since 1999. He studied fine arts at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he graduated in Katharina Sieverding’s master class. Jörres’s work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Mönchehaus Museum of Modern Art, Goslar, and in several group shows such as “Conceptual Tendencies 1960s to Today II” at Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (2013), “MoDiMiDoFrSaSo” at VeneKlasen Werner, Berlin (2011), and “BERLIN2000” at the Pace Gallery, New York (2009). DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 am to 6 pm. During Gallery Weekend, the gallery will have extended opening hours from 11 am to 9 pm Friday, May 1st and from 11 am to 7 pm Saturday, May 3rd and Sunday, May 4th. Please contact Owen Reynolds Clements with press requests or for further information at owen@dittrich-schlechtriem.com essay EN DE LESS NARRATIVE, MORE PROTOCOL By KITO NEDO The pure white color RAL 9010 has a curiously ambivalent reputation. The New York-based architect Richard Meier, for example, swears by the blindingly white tone and credits it with a “harmonizing power.”1 Meier’s architecture firm, which has built numerous museums, relies on RAL 9010 as a virtual default color, effectively making it a trademark feature of its projects: “Richard Meier white.” And the architect hardly stands alone with his fondness for RAL 9010: it is the color of mainstream architecture. A sales brochure issued by a German manufacturer of doors advertises the standard hue as a “classic,” calling it “the uncontested top-selling tone: not too soft, not too harsh. Just exactly right.” The technical-sounding name actually derives from the “Reichs-Ausschuss für Lieferbedingungen” (German State Commission for Delivery Terms) established in 1925 to support the rationalization of the German industry. To this day—as the website of the Deutsches Institut für Gütesicherung und Kennzeichnung, which now defines the RAL palette, notes—the classic RAL palette, currently composed of 213 hues, is intended to be “of overriding public interest” and insulated against “the influence of short-term fashions.” Yet RAL 9010 has not met with undivided love. Some observers are antagonized by its ubiquity in combination with its inconspicuous and nondescript quality. A few years ago, the Rotterdam-based architect Maurice Nio decried RAL 9010 as the epitome of the generic, calling it “the color that denies the existence of color.”2 Its easy availability, Nio argued, made RAL 9010 a building block in the trend toward standardization that leads to ever more uniform contemporary architecture. There is no color that is just a color. READ MORE Klaus Jörres, o.t., 2015, Latex paint on cotton, 200 x 150 cm Klaus Jörres, o.t., 2015, Acrylic on cotton, 200 x 150 cm instagram facebook OPENING HOURS Mon-Sat: 11.00AM — 6.00PM CONTACT DETAILS Dittrich & Schlechtriem ConceptStore GmbH Linienstrasse 23, 10178 Berlin, Germany Phone +493024342462 info@dittrich-schlechtriem.com