Sunrise - Laura Aberham
Images of the Exhibition
Description
Does anyone still remember the strange debate that haunted art blogs and magazines a few years ago, centered on a phenomenon dubbed “zombie abstraction” or “zombie formalism”? Sparked in large part by an article by art critic Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, the discussion explored why so many contemporary abstract paintings looked uncannily alike—often decorative and dull, like lifeless echoes of well-worn ideas from earlier abstract painting.* The debate raised a serious question: is there any uncharted territory left in non-objective painting, or have all the paths in this field already been thoroughly explored?
It was in 2014, the very year Saltz’s article appeared, that Laura Aberham began studying painting at the renowned Kunstakademie (Art Academy) in her hometown of Düsseldorf. Soon after, she devoted herself fully to precisely that much-debated field of abstract painting. Even her early academy works revealed a strong focus on color—on contrasts, effects, and textures. At first, she experimented with intensifying contrast through collage elements embedded in her paintings. Later, she explored transparency phenomena by combining different materials such as ink, oil, and acrylic paint. Since around 2018, she has concentrated on working with acrylics, developing a distinct personal style that allows her to express a process-based, intuitive approach to painting.
By the time she graduated in 2019, this style had taken on a pronounced character: dynamic, color-intensive, and highly complex compositions, whose most striking feature is broad, sweeping, often wave-like bands of color that flow across the canvas in multiple overlapping layers.
Though Aberham’s work may still carry traces of Abstract Expressionism or Art Informel in its DNA, it is in no way marked by the subjectivist stance or existential pathos of those postwar styles. Her work does not process emotional states, nor is it concerned with psychological self-exploration. Rather, it focuses on the act of painting itself—and the adventures and detours that painted color undergoes. In Aberham’s work, color behaves less like an existential metaphor and more like a natural force. When the artist gave titles like Wave, Storm, and Departure to her paintings in 2019, the year of her graduation, this said a lot about her dynamic understanding of painting. But not all of her works have titles—there’s a noticeable skepticism in her attitude toward language’s ability to access her visual worlds. She meets the question of what her paintings “mean” with incomprehension—and rightly so. This painting is not meant to be interpreted or intellectually grasped but rather seen and experienced in its sensual, physical presence.
It’s clear that Laura Aberham’s approach to painting owes much to her academy teacher, Katharina Grosse—a connection the artist herself acknowledges frequently. Grosse’s work represents one of the most advanced positions in contemporary abstraction. From her, Aberham received encouragement to approach color with freedom and spontaneity. And yet, as it must be, she has forged her own path. While Grosse has long extended painting into three-dimensional realms—sculptural forms, installations, architectural interventions—Aberham has so far remained committed to the painted surface, the rectangle of the canvas. Put simply: where Katharina Grosse brings painting into space, Laura Aberham is interested in generating spatiality within the painting itself.
This pictorial spatiality is intricate, ambiguous, and elusive. The layering of brushstrokes and color applications, the push and pull of individual hues—some advancing visually, others receding—as well as the varying degrees of opacity and transparency of acrylic paint all contribute to a complex visual field that can often overwhelm the viewer’s eye.
Aberham confidently disregards the vertical and horizontal limits of the canvas rectangle, which in formalist approaches to abstract painting often play a key compositional role. In her work, the edges of the canvas feel incidental, not constitutive to the composition. The image fields seem like fleeting fragments of a much larger cosmos of possibilities—one that extends boundlessly beyond the frame. For instance, in Untitled 1623 (2023), a broad brushstroke appears to enter from beyond the upper left corner, arcs across the canvas, then disappears downward in a wide flow. Similarly, in Komposition Blau (2022), sprayed white lines meander across the visible field, only to vanish again beyond the picture’s edge into some undefined expanse.
The paradoxical sense of spatiality in Aberham’s paintings arises from the abundance—indeed, overabundance—of motion they embody. In a painting like Frei (2022), we do find static elements, such as the opaquely painted pink shapes in the upper right quadrant. These forms mark the material surface of the canvas, yet paradoxically they are overlaid by a surging wave of color. Over the past few years, Aberham has regularly used such static "islands" in her paintings as resting and orientation points for the viewer’s gaze. In her more recent works featured in this catalog, however, these elements have been reduced to tiny fragments—if they appear at all. The dynamic aspect now clearly dominates; all components seem to move in various directions and at differing speeds. The painting presents itself as a snapshot of a situation that might completely shift in the next moment. No fixed forms are being depicted—rather, processes are being initiated. This is a painting of becoming—of continuous appearances and disappearances of form. The fluid nature of color suits this perfectly. In Aberham’s hands, paint is a liquid material that can be wiped away, dissolved into misty sprays, applied in broad smears—or, more rarely as in Karneval (2023), run in rivulets that follow gravity to the lower edge of the painting.
Anyone who knows Laura Aberham knows she has a strong affinity for carnival—the cultural celebration that is so vital in her native Rhineland. That she dedicates a six-square-meter painting to the "fifth season" is telling. The result is a turbulent, intensely colorful painting where all primary and secondary colors make their appearance. In front of a tightly knit bundle of short, broad brushstrokes, mysterious symbols rise—sprayed in pink or blue—evoking birds or clouds. The fact that this “foolish revelry” is not rendered as an all-over composition, but instead includes open spaces (especially along the right edge), intensifies the presence and energy of the color marks. Her 2023 works reveal that Aberham’s visual language has become more spontaneous, faster, and somewhat rougher. Elegant wave-lines are increasingly replaced by fragmented color traces marked with scratches—as the artist now sometimes uses a crusty board, rather than a broad brush, to drag pigment across the surface. The aptly titled Scratch is a prime example.
No discussion of her painting techniques would be complete without mentioning the role of light. A pervasive brightness seems to radiate from the backgrounds of Aberham’s works. Even in an unusually dark painting like Nachtfahrt (2023), a soft glow emerges from the depths and pushes forward. It's surely not insignificant that the artist, born in 1994, belongs to the generation of “digital natives,” whose visual conditioning was shaped primarily by backlit screens. This imprint seems to resonate in her painting.
In 2020, Laura Aberham created a monumental two-by-five-meter painting in the parking garage of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. It consisted of three layers of transparent soft-PVC sheets, painted on and installed in front of a whitewashed wall that illuminated the painting from behind. Even—perhaps especially—because this work was executed in an untypical technique, it revealed a core principle of her painting practice. That she has titled her first solo exhibition at Galerie Wolfgang Jahn in Munich Sunrise is therefore telling. In her painting—and this is a fundamentally optimistic trait—a light always rises.
So, to return to the initial question: can abstract painting still break new ground, or is it doomed to endlessly recycle historical ideas in the form of “zombie abstraction”? In light of Laura Aberham’s powerful, vital paintings—each one sending the viewer’s eye on an unending 160-by-130-centimeter journey—the answer becomes obvious. This is painting that does not feed on faded, “undead” concepts. It draws from the inexhaustible power of color and the dynamic spontaneity of the painting process itself.
*Jerry Saltz: “Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?”, New York Magazine, June 16, 2014
Peter Lodermeyer
