STUTTGART.- Three exhibition levels, three artistic concepts, three nominations: Corinne Wasmuht, Myriam Holme, and Leni Hoffmann are showing their work on the occasion of the third awarding of the »Kubus. Sparda Art Prize at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.« The 20,000 Euro-endowed prize was established jointly by the Sparda-Bank Baden-Württemberg and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in 2013. Since then the prize has been awarded biennially and gained increasing significance and attention. The winner among this year’s nominated artists will be announced on May 30, 2017, in conjunction with a panel discussion. The Sparda Bank is once again offering a public-choice award in the amount of 5,000 Euro, which will be conferred at the end of the exhibition period.

The »Kubus. Sparda Art Prize at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart« is characterized by two features. On the one hand, it honors an outstanding artistic achievement, regardless of the artist’s age. Hence the prize is neither an advancement award for younger artists nor one that honors an artist’s life achievement. Instead it is intended to keep an open view on the broad spectrum of artistic production in Baden-Württemberg. The prerequisite for nomination is simply that artists either be born in Baden-Württemberg or have their work based here.

On the other hand—and this comprises the second feature of the award—each of the three nominees presents him- or herself, in advance of the actual conferring of the prize, with selected works exhibited on one floor of the Cube, the museum’s special exhibitions area. Hence, the »Kubus. Sparda Art Prize at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart« offers the audience an opportunity to become acquainted with the most varied artworks before the winner is determined. The award ceremony takes place following a multistep procedure, at the outset of which some fifteen art-sector representatives recommend up to three artists each. In the next step, a five-person, national jury selects three nominees from this list. During the run of the exhibition, a further jury determines the award winner.

The prize was awarded for the first time in 2013. The nominees at the time were Alexander Roob, Katrin Mayer, and Thomas Locher. The winner was the longtime professor at the Stuttgart Academy of Fine Arts, the chronicler and draftsman Alexander Roob. In 2015, in conjunction with the museum’s ten-year anniversary, a theme was specified for the exhibition: »art & music.« The nominees were Nevin Aladag, the performance duo Discoteca Flaming Star, and the doyen of interactive music installations, Peter Vogel of Freiburg. By awarding of the prize to Peter Vogel, who has long enjoyed international recognition in Japan and the United States, the artist could be introduced to a broad audience here in Germany.

This year’s »Kubus. Sparda Art Prize at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart« is devoted to the theme »expanded painting.« Corinne Wasmuht, Myriam Holme, and Leni Hoffmann are the nominees. The works of the three artists underscore the unbroken currency of the genre, including in the art production in Baden-Württemberg. The selection revealed just how diverse the expressive forms of painting are today; for instance, painting is suited to more than just the two-dimensional surface, having long since expanded into the surrounding space.

What one notices in the theoretical underpinnings of this genre-crossing process, particularly in art created since the 1960s, is the significant role played by the Hungarian-born art publicist Laszlo Glozer, with his definition of »departing from the image.« His considerations—a self-referential exploration of the medium of painting and its related installative tendencies—were reflected in the epochal exhibition »WESTKUNST« (1981), conceived by Kasper König and Glozer, and in the handbook by Glozer, published in conjunction with the show.1

The above-mentioned show is just one example of a multitude of exhibitions and projects that have explored the genre of painting and its artistic investigation in recent decades. The three artists nominated for the »Kubus. Sparda Art Prize at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart« probe the genre’s boundaries even further and reflect current forms of an expanded notion of painting.

Corinne Wasmuht developed her artistic approach against the backdrop of the excessive figurative painting of the »Neuen Wilden,« or Neo-Expressionists, which emerged in the 1980s. With her detailed, virtuously painted images, she occupies a counter-position: »My initial precision was a response to the art of the eighties,« she remarked about her method in a 2009 interview. »I disdained the gestural. I was anti-splotch.«2

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart offers a comprehensive view of Wasmuht’s oeuvre. On display are works from 2002 to 2017, including three pieces being presented for the first time. The artist uses the technique of enamel painting, in which paint is applied layer by layer onto wood and lends the piece a shimmering colorfulness, transparency, and lightness. Given the elaborate nature of the technique, typically only a few works a year leave the artist’s studio.

Wasmuht’s kaleidoscopic compositions have their basis in a subjective pictorial archive arranged by theme and motif. She initially collected originals from magazines and print media and processed parts of them into paper collages. She now uses her own photographs, which, since 2001, she collages on the computer, creating templates for her compositions. Wasmuht frequently focuses on places of transit, such as airports or shopping centers, in which we encounter contrary conditions simultaneously, such as passengers waiting or hurrying by. The overlayering of structures and perspectives certainly allows details to remain recognizable, but overall a new visual reality emerges. As such, the artist brings the simultaneity of different temporal levels in her painting into alignment The paintings appear like the condensation of snapshots and, at the same time, are an expression of a globalized, depersonalized reality.

The decision to work on a large scale is part of Wasmuht’s artistic strategy. It prevents us from attaining an immediate grasp of all the image’s information. Instead, the viewer’s eye must scan the surface, probing and evaluating it, bit by bit. Wasmuht’s paintings refer to a present day that is inundated by images. At the same time, they stand for the conviction that painting has retained its claim to be an instrument of recognition and analysis.

Working on and with materials has been characteristic of art since the mid-1960s. Through her use of a multitude of materials, Myriam Holme also expands the boundaries of painting and the panel picture in terms of content and space. On the one hand, she combines in her works different genres, such as collage, the panel painting, and sculpture, into readily accessible installations. On the other hand, her works frequently move from the wall into space, traversing it in all directions.

From the outset, Holme has been interested in the experiment and process in painting. Both become apparent through her combination of the most varied materials, surfaces, and textures, such as aluminum, wood, bamboo, laces, stains, reflective foil, paint, soap, or glass. Their contradictory characteristics, such as mat and shiny, solid and transparent, open up a poetic dialogue on the painterly potential of materials.

How far material can be reinterpreted is revealed by Holme’s use of simple plastic sheeting in the installation »glanzgewebtes dazwischen« (»something splendor-woven in between,« 2017). Initially used to protect the floor in Holme’s studio and correspondingly saturated with paint stains, the sheets were then given an application of gilt—brass or bronze rolled out wafer-thin—vastly transforming their appearance. The artist creates works of art that can be experienced holistically, as they also reflect the diversity and fragile beauty of existence.

Holme’s use of natural materials as well as her thinking in cycles and series demonstrate an awareness of change, of the principle of the growth and decay of conditions as found in nature. Holme does not paint pictures in the traditional sense. Instead, she inscribes herself bodily into them, so to speak, during the making of her technically elaborate works and expansive installations, such as when she leaves her fingerprints on the surfaces—the gilt or the uppermost soap layer—of her pictures, and thereby realizes a specific form of painterly gesture.

Context shifts between art and life have also played a significant role in painting since the 1960s, raising the question of the extent to which painterly phenomena appear in all life contexts. Leni Hoffmann’s work responds to this question with a clear answer: »leni hoffmann emancipates painting: away from the canvas and instead toward real space and everything of the everyday.«3

The artist works on-site, developing her conceptions in and for the spaces on which she is focused. Her ephemeral interventions and architectonic mediations interweave the museum’s interior and everyday exterior and thus transcend the contextual boundaries. In this way, she alters the perception of spaces, highlights what is remote and site-specific, and sensitizes the awareness of those moving through her installations.

One of her most significant means of expression is the material of modelling clay. Hoffmann values its everyday origin, like the fact that clay is historically »unburdened« as a means of painting and hence not subject to any contextual connotations. Modelling clay is malleable, changeable, and yet resistant. The color palette of the material allows sensual, painterly articulations in space that are simultaneously present as sculptural forms.

In the context of »Kubus. Sparda Art Prize at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart,« Hoffmann moreover is continuing the project she began in 1997, »pizzicato_42«, this time in collaboration with the Stuttga rter Zeitung . In this work, the artist intervenes in the production process of the daily newspaper. During the printing run, she implants an infinite, colored stripe pattern using special inks—normally in the reserved, right column of the section »Aus aller Welt« (From around the World). »pizzicato_42« results in a newspaper original, a unicum that will be delivered to subscribers free of charge and can also be purchased on the free market. A portion of the printed edition is available in the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart for visitors to keep and take home.


1 Cf. Westkunst: Zeitgenössische Kunst seit 1939 , ed. Laszlo Gloser (Cologne, 1981), handbook to the intl. exh. of the same name at the Trade Fair halls, Cologne, 1981, organized by the Museen der Stadt Köln.

2 Kito Nedo, »Nachtschichten,« art : Das Kunstmagazin (October 2009), pp. 48–53.

3 Katia Baudin, »›die strassen sind unsere pinsel, die plätze unsere paletten‹: leni hoffmanns rgb,« in Leni Hoffmann, RGB , exh. cat. Museum Ludwig Cologne (Cologne, 2010), p. 64.