About the Work
Rest instead of movement; structure in chaos. Raimund Girke's monochrome pictorial language permits apparent opposites to fuse together. The canvas is dominated by the monochrome nature of the white. Girke's white, however, is not pure: it is mixed and duller, in some places applied with a spatula, leaving the dark ground to shine through, while elsewhere it is thrown wildly across the canvas so that evenly arching, brilliant white streaks lie on top of the delicate shades of grey. The resulting chiaroscuro produces a curious spatiality, which has a destabilising but nonetheless calming effect, because a search for order appears in the casual, liberated gesture. It is not yet concluded, and so the painting lingers somewhere in between. This state lends the picture a moment of objectivity, which will only become possible through the suspension of clarity. Like his role model Mark Rothko, Girke develops in this way a dialectic in which a rigid "either/or" gives way to an exciting "not only/but also".
