This was the first solo exhibition in Europe for Cay Bahnmiller (1955–2007). Focusing on sculptures, works on paper and books, the presentation presented an excellent selection covering the period from 1989 to 2004 – almost a mini-retrospective, but excluding the greatest paintings by the American artist. The exhibition demonstrated Bahnmiller’s radicalism and inventiveness by continually expanding and rethinking his pictorial practice, extending it to formats beyond classical panel painting. It also underlined how much painting, for her, was a part of life. She saw her work as an open process, a sort of chronicle fueled by deep reflection on what she read (from Bertolt Brecht to Mei-mei Berssenbrugge) and acute, penetrating observations of herself and everyday life. . Almost all of his pictorial works on paper include everyday ephemera: lists, notes, poems, photographs, personal communications, pages torn from books. It was a fluid practice that always kept open the question: what could painting still become?
Take the three sculptures – compact, airtight wooden objects, all untitled (two undated, one from 1989) – which Bahnmiller has reworked many times over more than a decade. (His pieces are usually dated by the year of their completion, as it might be impossible to tell when work on each began.) The painting here is a kind of sedimentation, the original object disappearing under accumulations of crisp opaque paint applied over time. . The basic material for the works probably consisted of chance finds in the artist’s urban environment. The use of paint to transform found objects into small sculptures gives them a particular indeterminacy: one vaguely imagines that they were once of some use, but now these scattered fragments of reality have taken on an air of immutability and from another world. This is also what painting can do: by accumulating and cementing time, it opens the way to an abstraction of real things, infusing them with interiority.
Reworking and recasting ostensibly finished pieces was a defining part of Bahnmiller’s practice. His creative restlessness, palpable throughout his work, resulted in a process fueled by a permanent self-contradiction. Its perpetual self-questioning and revision has been read as a form of deeply thoughtful productivity, but also as self-sabotage. There is likely some truth in both. Perhaps her practice could be described as reverse archaeology: rather than removing layers, she stores them in an endless succession. Bahnmiller strove to bury experiences, readings and feelings – not all sanguine – in her images, to seal them among painterly gestures, found materials and poetic composition, safeguarding them in an occult presence.
Bahnmiller’s books and works on paper are complex pictorial amalgams in which the layers of writing and painting are intimately allied. The coarse-textured front of one of these sheets (untitled, undated) shows two vertical elements along its edges – figures, perhaps, or houses, both in dark tones and volumes compact, with a laconic, shimmering gesture brush in blue hovering above. The composition partly covers and partly frames the lines of a poem in its center. But Bahnmiller also used the (normally invisible) back of the drawing, on which she pasted a page from a court file: after being violently attacked in 1993, she reported the attacker to the police, but he was acquitted – an experience that left her doubly traumatized. . The recording is literally preserved in the work.
Bahnmiller sometimes dove deep into his own story. Consider BA 1959, undated: partially covered with tape, its layers of paint showing tiny cracks, the image is divided by the line between sky and sea, with a vaguely identifiable ship on the horizon, to the right. The rather rough composition in dark browns and beiges is interrupted by bold brushstrokes in a dazzling yellow: thin dabs of dry paint – rays of light, perhaps. In 1959, when Bahnmiller was four years old, his family moved to Buenos Aires, making the work a souvenir of the trip – a pictorial expedition into the realm of distant memories.
Translated from the German by Gerrit Jackson.
