Galerie b2

Selma van Panhuis has invited Georg Fuchssteiner to a joint exhibition at the b2_ gallery, in which they are now visualizing the congenial interweaving of their artistic approaches titled “Colour Planes and Stains”. We are delighted to present a finely tuned exhibition of paintings, drawings and objects in which the works, their similarities and contrasts, create a common tone that corresponds wonderfully in its sensible lightness with the onset of spring.
Based on a non-representational pictorial language reminiscent of colour field painting, Selma van Panhuis’ oeuvre repeatedly moves from abstraction to the representational. This is always accompanied by a reflection on the medium of painting and direct references to the history of ideas of modernism and the avant-garde. In addition to the consistent awareness of every colour application and painting process the respective image carriers, their form, feel and quality, play an important role. Thus, van Panhuis’ works are characterized by a high degree of concentration and reduction to the essentials, that of “waiting for the right moment”: pictures must be allowed to develop, while work is carried out in the “dark” until a longed-for but unforeseen possibility reveals itself. This approach results in paintings and pictorial objects that raise the question of transcendence and in which the traces of the creative process are inscribed both spatially and temporally.

The conscious alternation between active and passive creative moments also plays a causal role in Georg Fuchssteiner’s artistic practice. His drawings and paintings seem to be created by allowing them to grow and flourish. Individual elements repeat themselves, refer to each other and are taken up again in a different way. Variation and repetition, both in what is depicted and, in the representation, organize and structure Fuchssteiner’s works. Based on his curiosity and openness to art, music and literature, he constantly moves between abstraction and representationalism. Figures also repeatedly find a place in his oeuvre, but the presentation, the painterly composition, remains in the foreground.
Both Fuchssteiner and van Panhuis aim to evoke moods, tones and abstract messages using genuinely painterly means. The works in the exhibition “Colour Planes and Stains” open up hidden landscapes to the viewer, evoke strange memories, resemble sensory impressions gained through contemplation, they resemble pleasurable snapshots. Together they combine sonata-like to form a larger and polyphonic impression.