Gelin­gen. Gelin­gen

Mar 20 2026– May 20 2026

The painter Willi Baumeis­ter called the devi­a­tion from the artist’s intend­ed aim — caused by the material’s resis­tance — a “cre­ative angle”, and saw this intru­sion as essen­tial to the very mak­ing of art. The exhi­bi­tion on “suc­cess” (ger. Gelin­gen) aims to recall this process, which is not entire­ly sub­ject to the artist’s will. In the hold­ings of Galerie Elis­a­beth & Klaus Thoman, there are many works in which the strug­gle between idea and mate­r­i­al has end­ed hap­pi­ly. The result­be­comes all the more spec­tac­u­lar the more risky the ini­tial con­di­tions are.

For this rea­son, Éva Bodnár’s paint­ings pro­vide a guid­ing motif for the exhi­bi­tion: at first glance they appear rather ran­dom and uncon­trolled, yet upon clos­er inspec­tion a com­pelling result emerges. Mai-Thu Per­ret alludes to this latent mis­un­der­stand­ing in the title of one of her sculp­tures: Unaware it was a jew­el, he thought it just rub­ble (2020, glazed ceram­ic).
Paint­ing has always been the artis­tic dis­ci­pline that sought to let the idea emerge from the process. (A sim­i­lar prin­ci­ple can be found in ceram­ics, whose process­es of for­ma­tion are illus­trat­ed by anoth­er sculp­ture by Mai-Thu Per­ret.) Sarah Bechter and Johannes Wohn­seifer offer alter­na­tive meth­ods of achiev­ing suc­cess with their works. Bechter intro­duces batik, a tech­nique in which col­or gra­di­ents can­not be ful­ly con­trolled. The result­ing chance forms are then painter­ly con­cretized into fig­ures. The Polaroid Paint­ings (2017–2024) by Wohn­seifer place paint­ing in rela­tion to tech­ni­cal repro­duc­tion and pho­tog­ra­phy.
What might have been con­sid­ered a fail­ure in that con­text is here effort­less­ly inte­grat­ed into the his­to­ry of painter­ly abstraction—without the painter him­self appear­ing to be com­pelled toward any par­tic­u­lar form. The twists and turns of the mate­r­i­al must some­times first be assessed as “errors”.

In any case, the tra­di­tion­al process of form-find­ing with­in the “cre­ative angle” has been under­mined by tech­nol­o­gy (as well as by con­cep­tu­al art). This is echoed in the video final play (2013) by Julia Borne­feld, which presents a burn­ing grand piano while oscil­lat­ing between rep­re­sen­ta­tion and abstrac­tion.
The nego­ti­a­tion process between idea and mate­r­i­al inevitably begins in the abstract, with pure mate­ri­al­i­ty. Only through the work­ing process does the work acquire mean­ing; forms charged with sig­nif­i­cance emerge that refer to a real­i­ty beyond the image.

The ten­sion between abstrac­tion and rep­re­sen­ta­tion there­fore forms a sec­ond motif in this exhi­bi­tion. With a del­i­cate, draw­ing-like inter­ven­tion on one of the large shop windows—which, like Oswald Oberhuber’s num­ber paint­ings, recalls Mar­cel Duchamp—Paul Thuile draws atten­tion to this unsta­ble rela­tion­ship to real­i­ty. The pres­ence of the two senior fig­ures, Ober­hu­ber and Bruno Giron­coli, sug­gests that the idea of suc­cess is by no means mere­ly a con­tem­po­rary phe­nom­e­non.

JULIA BORNEFELD, JOHANNES WOHNSEIFER,
SARAH BECHTER, PAUL THUILE, MAI-THU PERRET,
ÉVA BODNÁR (in order of their appear­ance)
BRUNO GIRONCOLI, OSWALD OBERHUBER (cameos)
Stephan Schmidt-Wulf­fen (cura­tor)