BARCELONA.- Pas une Orange is presenting kSuL22svwBxgJ2Z, its second exhibition, a dialogue between Cologne-based artist David Ostrowski and Berlin-based artist Oliver Osborne. The show presents several paintings of Ostrowski's new series 'F (Design Object), 2021' and a selection of Osborne's serie of rubber plants (all 2020), which are part of an ongoing exploration of this subject that the artist started in 2013.

This selection of 8 works, presented for the first time in Spain, represent the first collaboration between the two artists.

The show will be open until September 19th, 2021 for the Barcelona Gallery Weekend.

“Trying to paint in the same way as Flaubert was trying to write "a book about nothing", about writing itself. This nothingness is what we discover in Oliver Osborne's rubber plant series. Not that he doesn't paint a thing. On the contrary, he creates a series of rubber plants with more than excellent resemblance and an impeccable technique, titling them with a date on which he may have completed them – even if he probably didn’t finish them in a single day. These very precise images play with some concept like photographic reproductibility, repetition as a meme or the design-like aesthetics of advertisement. But we have all these possible topics (and more) in forms that seem to saturate the frame of vision and turn out to be representations of daily and banal objects. The same thing happens with Ostrowski, whose nothingness is more on the side of an expressive and elusive abstraction. A gestural brushstroke that invites us to imagine something but without ceasing to impose itself as a deaf matter. The dialogue works precisely in that approach to the limits of the painting itself from two very different horizons. ”

--Curatorial Text: Aurélien Le Genissel

“I dream of two people visiting KSuL22svwBxgJ2Z. One says to the other: "My child can do this" "That’s 19th century still life painting", answer the other. The struggle between painting as virtuosity or transgression. As sense or technique. As representation or matter. KSuL22svwBxgJ2Z deactivates these two critical asymptotes. It cancels them in a way.”.




The title of the exhibition, KSuL22svwBxgJ2Z, comes from a Google’s password generated automatically. As arbitrary and enigmatic as the artists' own paintings, perhaps its true meaning lies in the idea that painting has to be observed -and enjoyed- as a password of which we have forgotten the meaning. Or the use.

OLIVER OSBORNE

Born 1985, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Lives and works in Berlin. Represented by Tanya Leighton gallery.

“...features a suite of 14 paintings of rubber plants (all 2020), which is part of an ongoing exploration of this subject that Osborne started in 2013. The seriality of these works is evidenced not just in the subject matter but in their dimensions and titles, all of which take the form of dates. Presumably, these indicate when each painting was completed, but the naming convention also plays with the idea of the works being the product of a single day. This links them to both On Kawara’s ‘Today’ series (1974–2014), in which the artist documented the date in a painting every day until his death, and Peter Dreher’s ‘Day by Day, Good Day’ (1974–ongoing): daily depictions of the same simple glass of water.” --FRIEZE Magazine Issue : August 2020

DAVID OSTROWSKI

David Ostrowski was born in Cologne, in 1981, and graduated from Kunstakedemie Düsseldorf, where he studied painting under Albert Oehlen. Since he began exhibiting in 2006, he has put on numerous solo and group shows throughout Europe and the United States.

His work focuses on what he calls degree zero of painting, an approach to pictorial question that goes beyond the problems of representation or mimesis.