Stephanie Abben (*1976) graduated from the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe in 2010 as a meisterschüler, having attended the painting classes of Professor Dorner and Professor Meuser. Before that she had studied art history and philosophy at the Ruhr Universität Bochum. Today she is living in Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf as a freelance artist.
Abben's large–size paintings evoke the impression of landscapes at first sight. Her compositions oscillate between abstraction and figuration, and thus the references to nature remain on an associative level. Yet they do not occur by chance or arbitrarily, but rather bequeath the classical nature piece, as it has sunken into the collective memory, to the modern world of art. But they can offer a lot more than just traditional landscape painting – a loathed word for the artist who would not let her work be restricted to this atavistic genre.
Still, on the surface, many of her works connotate landscapes: Her choice of colours, e.g., is dominated by blue, grey, green and black. The voluminous sprawling of her colours on the wall also implies references to nature: Sometimes Abben's compositions "grow" from one of the lower corners of a picture and have their linear sprouts sent out in diagonal lines across the picture. Then again, compositions are divided up between imaginary realms of sky and earth, and the fact that brighter colours are chosen for the upper sphere gives the spectator the impression that there is a natural source of light. Additionally do the horizontal arrangements of ectoplasmatically round colour fields seem to be derived from the same realms. Whenever these fields occur as closed forms, they remind of huddled stones from whose centre leaves of grass sprout - dark sketches of colour that work as a counterpart for the vaguely iridescent background. When the contours blur, the colour areas open up spacey views that seem to stretch much further than the canvas.
Thus it seems only consistent that Abben sometimes leaves the canvas behind and paints directly onto walls. She not only accepts that her works, then, cannot last for very long – as they are painted onto walls of public exhibition facilities that are only temporarily a home for her art; rather is this short lifespan a part of Abben's concept, as it corresponds to Abben's theme of evanescence and thereby forms a welcome counterpart to, e.g., the frescoes of the renaissance artists that have lasted for centuries. Thus, the principles of nature can be experienced as well topically as physically. The sensuality of the colour's surface touches the spectator, the artistic gestus is contagious and evokes an unfashionable longing for epochs when those who held up a romantic view on nature were not looked down upon as reactionary philistines.
Such subtextual references to C.D. Friedrich are traditional in Abben's work. Her earliest works are sea pieces: a hearty blue, created from coarse–grained pigments and forcefully smashed on the rough cardboard. An expressive brush technique and a gleaming ultramarine dominate the picture. Automatically, the visual archive in the specator's head comes up with "The Monk by the Sea" – albeit without the monk, but not less impressive.
It could all be so easy: A longing for harmony that could easily be fulfilled in nature pieces – but there are those subtle refractions that disturb the retinal idyll. Between the brushstrokes Abben always includes factors that undermine the promise of a remorseless indulgence into the pictures, and thus evoke an air of self–irony within the Rousseau–like call "back to nature".
This happens in many ways. Firstly, there is the inclusion of white that dampens the brightness of the colours, crawls across the compositions like rising mist and works as a hindrance for distance vision. Although this milky haze is continuously punctuated by black areas – that suggest a certain depth –, these areas cannot be located accurately and therefore remain pure non–colours without details or contours. The game of colour perspective and aerial perspective may begin!
On the other hand, the illusionary effect is hindered by the self–referential texture of the picture surface. Abben's painting style, rejecting all mimetic functions, is primarily occupied with itself. And thus each of her artistic actions can not only be mentally retrieved, but physically re–felt. The scratching of the brush over the rough texture of the canvas, the pastose thickening of primed oil squashes, then again the slow seepage of watery colours into the linen, the uncontrollable leakage of the wet areas of colour, pigment particles that stick in the cavities of the material... In the sensual celebration of the act of painting lies the real appeal of Abben's work and contextualizes it with abstract expressionism, the Informel, but also with contemporary painters like Gotthard Graubner or Per Kirkeby.
But this open confession of artistic action obviates illusionistic effects: The medium "painting" is too foregrounded, too present to be perceived as anything different than itself. So is it an honest kind of l'art pour l'art that is utterly self–referential?
Not quite, as even this principle is countered in a truly iconoclastic act: Whereas the art of the Informel, e.g., completely lacks irony while ploughing through painting, Abben makes herself at home there. She creates a kind of comfort zone for herself in her recent works, drags along elements like lamps, chairs or clothes lines – and thereby makes the allegedly self–sufficient act of painting absurd. These moments of disintegration only strengthen the impression of a staged setting. At this point at the latest we understand Abben's ambivalent position towards the classical nature piece. On the one hand she confesses openly how much she adores painting in general and especially landscape painting in all of her work; on the other hand she cuts the cord to other figureheads of this school of thought like Herbert Brandl or Katharina Grosse by including subtle disintegrative moments in her work to mock the heroic pathos of the painter.
Theses ever–present jumps between close–range effects and long–range effects again confuse the spectator. This is not just the traditional spatial illusionism as it is necessarily included in every picture. Rather does Abben strictly negate the superficial promise of space that the artist seems to give at first glance. This is not only based on the colour application, that seems clumsy and therefore strangely two–dimensional, but also on the bizarre furniture of the series "nebul ös" that let Abben's landscapes appear somewhat "interior". Especially abstruse is the effect of the mountain lodge that seems to reanimate the archetypal roaring hart from the depths of the German Biedermeier to the mental lexicon of the spectators.
Additionally, the illusion of an untouched piece of nature is programmatically destroyed by these contaminants; there is colonization and construction work going on. With tongue in cheek, Abben replaces Friedrich's monk by a profane placeholder: the wooden lodge. However, both motifs function in the same way: Firstly they help the spectator to get into the picture by marking his imaginary viewing point, and secondly they work as reference points for the size of other objects by implying a scale within a confusing scenery. Still, these figurative artefacts all look fragile and clumsy: The lodges are askew, the clothes lines flap in the air and seem in danger of ripping any minute... This is also a reference to the motif of evanescence that Abben reinforces time and time again from different perspectives – so to speak as an underlying vanitas motif.
This postmodern variation of "memento mori" is not less present in the light objects of the series "luster". Replacing the traditional burning candle as a symbol of evanescence and near death, Abben chooses a less pathetic, albeit historically adequate pendant, the electric (exterior) lamp. But against all scientific probability this lamp also seems to flicker; it seems as if it could go out any moment like a candle in the wind. Its weak glimmer is just enough to be recognized in front of the dark background, but it is not capable of facing down the raging forces of nature around it. Accordingly, the actual source of light can only be found in the natural light of the upper part of the picture. So the seemingly lost lamps – stripped of their actual function – circle around themselves. Even if they appear in pairs, as it is the case in some of the pictures of the series, they seem self–absorbed and isolated. A sublimed couple that has lost track of reality because it is so entangled in emotion.
But the inclusion of figurative disturbances is not only legitimated by implications from this line of thought. Actually, they perform a compositional act: They function as classical repoussoirs to enhance the perception of depth, but at the same time they permeate a cosy atmosphere that would rather be expected of small rooms. Thus, Abben's work with motifs emphasizes the ambivalence of her painting technique, as the artist suggests space on the one hand, but also enhances close vision onto a comfort zone. This comfortable hominess is underlined by motifs that are drawn from the repertoire of the romance of the mountains, that are only schematically hinted at and are therefore reduced to art historic citations. These clearly display Abben's thorough sophistication of art history, but never in a pretentious or instructive way. As if by chance, a peculiarly German position is held, that is not so much based on her own history, but rather on her artistic predecessors'.
But what you remember is more than Abben's versatile juggling with references – a method that postmodernism has been tampering with for a long time. A lot more rarely does such poised understatement occur as you can find in Abben's work. Consequently she shuns all eye–catching effects, but offers nuances and inbetweens – in her choice of topics as well as in her painting style. She never tries to indoctrinate her audience, but lets them find their own perspectives. So, despite all connotations of landscapes and the occasional figurative mirages, her work seems ageless and ambiguous. It evokes longings without speaking of them, it raises wanderlust without giving up the safe haven of close vision. Close and far at once, foreign, but still familiar: Abben's work is as enigmatic as it is introvert. It circles around a place that you can enter wherever you are, at any given time: an inner house in an – albeit artificial – paradise.
Dr. Katia Tangian, 2010
Translated by Dr. Thomas Thielen, 2011
