Vary and Umberg at Jensen

Gϋnter Umberg & Elizabeth Vary: New works
Jensen Gallery
16 March - 1 May 2010

We have here a visual ‘conversation’ between a German couple using different ‘sentences’ that consist of groups of paintings - something vaguely related to the earlier interesting project Gow Langsford did with Simon Ingram and James Cousins, but not using sequences of pairings.

Umberg and Vary don’t mingle their paintings physically in clusters, or collaborate on single works, or even juxtapose them. Instead – with the help of a new temporary wall Andrew Jensen has installed in the centre of his very large gallery – they talk to each other across space, chatting through various salient similarities and contrasts and even mimicries.

Both these painters make sculptural objects that project out from the wall. In Umberg’s case he shows you from the side the supporting screws sticking out from the wall - they are not hidden inside the painted panel they hold up. He paints on solid wooden panels that present the painted rectangular front plane parallel to the wall, with the sides tilting back diagonally and hidden from the front. Vary on the other hand, tends to paint on chunky blocks or slabs made of cardboard. Occasionally her separate components lock together, like in a puzzle.

Umberg’s paint is highly light-absorbent, dark, powdered pigment, applied repeatedly on to alternating layers of sprayed on dammar varnish. In contrast Vary uses thin liquid oil glazes that dribble over the sides and which sometimes are mixed with smeared or daubed thick paint. She prefers a glossy surface with a full range of chroma and tone, often using metallic and fluorescent paint as well. He likes matt velvety monochromes: in this show, subtly varying blacks or greens. Her sides are just as important as the fronts, whereas he paints only the occasional narrow strip of the side-angled, laminated strata.

The details of their painting placements are such that Umberg occupies the centre of the long wall opposite the gallery entrance, with Vary having an unusual projecting tray-like work positioned near the righthand corner. She also occupies the two shorter end walls of the huge gallery while on the new moveable partition bisecting the gallery space, he has one side and she the other.

As you'd expect the dialogue between these two painters incorporates various lines of sight, sideways viewing of the wall reliefs, and overall vistas – as well as of course, close ups. Some of her dark planes at a distance could be muddled with his, and sometimes she has made fake Umberg bevelled panels. While he never touches block forms, she occasionally paints on little angular chunks with dark colours, and spikey angular slabs with pastel hues. She also likes to cut into the sides of thick rectangles and remove geometric shapes.

Umberg and Vary here have created an intriguing and whimsical hanging arrangement that is fun to explore. It is a visually rich and intelligent exhibition you could spend a lot of time with, moving around the five walls and zeroing in on the paintings from unusual angles. For a Jensen experience, with the new wall, it forces you to be quite mobile. One of their best.

Jensen group show

E=MC2 (Innes: Sandback: Umberg)
Jensen
22 April - 29 May 2009

In this exhibtuion Andrew Jensen has selected these three artists to contribute two works each in a show that could be about quantum physics (the above 2 is meant to signify ‘squared’) - not so much referencing time and its experienced materiality, as phenomena such as black holes and the intangibility of surface.

Fred Sandback’s two minimalist sculptures are very distinctive with their use of tautly stretched double threads of black (sometimes grey) acrylic yarn to suggest planes. When not implying solid sheets, these wondrously intriguing lines push the eye up into the rafters to check out the nearby wiring and grid formations of the parallel wooden beams, or below, the oil, ink and paint stains on the oft repaired concrete floor.

The two Sandback works are quite different. One is a single box shape with no lid (like a U) in front of a long white wall. The other is of three vertical rectangles where two are on the same plane but separated by the distance of their own width. Projecting out from halfway between them, at a right-angle, is the third oblong.

In contrast to such linear austerity, Gunter Umberg’s paintings deal with spatial depth via the deepest and darkest of tones. Dry powdered black has been repeatedly applied on to wooden panels using a dammar binder brushed on in alternating horizontal and vertical strokes. This creates a very delicate woven texture. You’d swear it is from a thin light fabric but not so. The sheenless pigment creates a dense void that draws you in through the solid panels. One is like a very tall narrow doorway. The other is a square positioned high on the wall. It has thick bevelled sides that suspend the surface away from the wall so it hovers in front of it, while paradoxically creating a window through.

Callum Innes is widely known for the use of subtraction in his painting making processes, but in this show only one of the two paintings involves that, a work where a large rectangle of horizontally aligned viscous black paint has a centrally positioned thin vertical line cut down into it, and drawn on turps is used to remove inner residues.

The other work, the additive one, involves using a brush to flick specks and globules of thick red oil paint onto a canvas covered with wet shellac, and continually picking out and resetting bits of crumbling half dry paint by hand until the shellac hardens. Innes’ myriad splinterlike fragments, as with Umberg’s work, are deceptive. They look like traces remaining from the application of a solvent, but the ‘islands’ of paint remnants are much thicker. Many of the delicate traces come from slivers of oil skin that have later been relocated.

For anyone interested in the continual reinventing of paint application and process, the spatial depth achieved by superdark fields or the perceptual nuances of linear sculptural form, this is a wonderful show. A treat for lovers of abstraction.