Newcomer

“My studio practice involves painting 30 to 50 images over an extended period of months and years. Layering is an essential part of my technique. Decisions about motifs, lines, shapes, colors or concepts are not set in stone; I can repaint or discard any idea, which leaves room for uncertainty. At the same time, I am continually making decisions and implementing them, creating a sense of self in the process.” In her painting, Ellen Gronemeyer develops an impressive radicalism that allows her to encounter the world with an open mind - somewhere between spontaneity and logic. Ellen Gronemeyer's painting combines elements of popular culture with classic art genres such as portraiture, landscapes and social studies. She draws on iconic, often everyday motifs, which she positions in a contemporary context. This combination of familiar, popular imagery and traditional art genres leads to an idiosyncratic, often humorous, but also critical examination of reality. Her protagonists are bizarre, sometimes comic-like creatures like dogs, plants or people. In her works, fantasy and reality collide, often creating grotesque yet humorous scenarios. Anything is possible: figures that alternate between imagination and realism convey a world in which both the limits of imagination and reality are called into question. Shifting back and forth between directness and complexity, Ellen Gronemeyer develops her painting style, which is reminiscent of the gestures of French Fauvism, Art Informel and Expressionism. Her figures are not only positioned in the painting, rather they also seem to be permeated through the pictorial plane. This process character is a central component of her working method: Gronemeyer often works on 30 to 50 paintings simultaneously. The canvases are initially used as a palette on which the first layer of paint is created beyond her immediate control. The scenes and motifs are then developed in a lengthy process of continuous overpainting until she achieves the final image. The material-emphasized painting style with encrusted, opulent layers of paint makes her pictures appear as a “total presence” on the canvas. Simultaneously, the viewer's gaze is drawn into surreal scenarios and motifs. Ambiguities emerge, revealing Gronemeyer's profound but also playful world of thought - a world that can also be read as a commentary on our current reality. A central theme in Gronemeyer's work is alienation. The title of her current exhibition, “Newcomer”, which includes works such as “Emotional Haircut”, “All My Friends”, “Seconds”, “Jako”, “Call the Police” and “Headliner”, can also be understood in this context. The philosopher Rahel Jaeggi describes alienation as a “relationship of unrelatedness”, a paradoxical state in which one is “involved and yet uninvolved”. This alienation can be seen in Gronemeyer's works, which “remove” familiar visual worlds and thus open up an open view of reality and its new possibilities. The titles of the works often play a decisive role: they concretize the world of motifs, but also open up room for interpretation. Gronemeyer refers not only to visual impressions, but also to an entire cultural and often pop-cultural world of references that draws on music, films and literature. One example of this association is the picture “Jako”, which is not a reference to the artist Alberto Giacometti, rather to a person called Jaque de Barscher, who inspired Karl Lagerfeld to create his perfume. Jako was a dandy who had a tragic story - a character who exemplifies the fragile balance between success and defeat. In Ellen Gronemeyer's paintings, not only do the boundaries between beings, times of day and places become blurred, but matter itself also dissolves. Figures and scenes can transform into abstract, materialized forms in the blink of an eye. The colors and brushstrokes lose their representational nature and develop a presence of their own, whereby the works reflect a constant state of change - the visible is repeatedly transformed into vibrant material. The delicate, almost fragile sculptures by Giacometti, which Gronemeyer uses here as a reference, reflect this fragile existence. These figures, which in Gronemeyer's works often oscillate between genders or plants and human beings, are also testimonies to a perception that exists beyond traditional categories - they are partly trans, partly hybrid, between day and night, between inside and outside.