Dynamics
Images of the Exhibition
Description
With the exhibition Dynamics, Galerie Wolfgang Jahn in Landshut presents works by Laura Aberham (*1994) and Paul Schwer (*1951), which enter into a congenial dialogue. Though the two artists hail from different generations and work in different media, their art—Aberham’s non-representational paintings and Schwer’s abstract sculptures—shares a common concern: to render dynamic processes and gestural movements visible and tangible through the static mediums of object and canvas.
Laura Aberham’s paintings are abstract works that communicate strongly on an intuitive level. Her pieces are vibrant in color, rich in contrast, sometimes glaringly bright, and synesthetically “loud.” They burst with (youthful) energy and strength, are agitated and defiant, lively, affirmative, and impulsive. These are gestural abstractions that feature sweeping motions, bands, arcs, and loops laid out in bold brushstrokes. Her forms literally unfold—like the organic growth of plants in nature, they spread successively across and into the pictorial space, asserting themselves expansively on the surface.
A dynamic interplay of layered colors emerges—an over-and-under of successive and overlapping strata—a constant struggle to dominate the field of vision. Like eruptions, the shapes and movements force their way into rich, intuitively formed compositions. Transparent and opaque surfaces alternate. Elements complement or replace one another in a composition that evolves over time, repeatedly undergoing changes up to its final state. The resulting pictorial spaces possess a depth that draws viewers in—like a vortex or whirlpool. At times, Aberham’s colorful bands and swirling forms, with their abrupt directional shifts, emphasize the flatness of the canvas, blocking any glimpse into a background. Her paintings become hallucinatory bursts of color—painterly embodiments of exuberance and the joy of life, expressing its intensity and drama through the power of motion and a rich diversity of forms and hues.
Movement is life—stillness its opposite. Aberham succeeds in distilling the dynamic tumult of the painting process into a moment of compositional balance. Her works capture a frozen instant of movement, suspended in time. It comes as little surprise that the artist, who studied with Katharina Grosse at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, belongs to a young generation eager to shape, transform, and renew the world, while also celebrating the wonder of existence.
Paul Schwer’s sculptural works similarly feature curved, oscillating shapes and folds in three-dimensional space. His objects are based on sheets of Plexiglas, vividly colored and enhanced through screen-printing—artworks in their own right. Bold neon tones often meet halftone dot patterns, evoking the visual language of Pop Art with its roots in advertising and mass media. These compositions, occasionally overlaid with painted botanical branches, serve as an intermediate stage in what Schwer considers an expanded concept of painting: through controlled heat and folding, the flat sheets gain volume and objecthood.
These bent and coiled forms can initially appear like casually crumpled paper—seemingly discarded despite their aesthetic complexity. Yet closer inspection reveals a carefully balanced composition—one that also accounts for structural stability. Sometimes the objects resemble intricately arranged candy wrappers; at other times, the botanical shapes of flower petals or seed pods. Schwer’s works, too, symbolize growth, expansion, and the occupation of space—like plants whose development could be witnessed in a time-lapse film.
The shaping process—much like drapery—brings some parts into the foreground while others recede into folds, generating completely new and unexpected perspectives on the original printed motifs. This calculated randomness results in a remix of already abstracted subjects.
Particularly captivating are Schwer’s monochromatic silver works. They appear cast in metal, their curled and rolled forms giving rise to fragile, airy volumes that contrast with their metallic sheen. Their reflective surfaces mirror the surrounding space and the viewer, who becomes distorted and abstracted in the curving forms—a part of the artwork itself.
Laura Aberham and Paul Schwer: both artists capture dynamic movement in the composition of their works—and in doing so, they create moving art in every sense of the word.
Dr. Veit Ziegelmaier
