GERMANY: Exhibition Nordheim - Talstraße 31/1 - Nordheimer Scheune - sinnig innig - ISA DAHL & DANIEL WAGENBLAST

Exhibition: „sinnig innig“ – ISA DAHL & DANIEL WAGENBLAST

From 10th February till 23rd March 2024 the fascinating artworks of ISA DAHL and DANIEL WAGENBLAST could be admired in the exhibition “sinnig innig” in the NORDHEIMER SCHEUNE. The title would mean in English „meaningfully intimate“. In this article here you will see several of their interesting creations from the duo exhibition in Nordheim, which is a beautiful village located between the cities Heilbronn and Stuttgart.

Curator HELMUT ALBERT MÜLLER about the exhibition: If you are familiar with Daniel Wagenblast’s 4.30 high cab driver at the Heilbronn Götzenturm, which was hewn out of a silver fir tree and then cast in aluminum and painted in color, you will have wondered about his new drawings in the entrance area of the Nordheim barn: These Wagenblast drawings are based, on the one hand, on photos he took last year in Palm Beach during an art fair. On the other hand, he studied David Hockney’s iPad frieze A Year in Normandy and other Hockney paintings, which were on display at Museum Würth 2 in Künzelsau until mid-July 2017: Wagenblast was inspired by these pictures to try out what happens when drawings are based on simple strokes placed next to and on top of each other.

As a result of his experiment, we see streets lined with street lamps, parked cars and rows of houses in yellow, rusty brown and purple, on which a Target supermarket can also be seen, a kind of Kaufland for the USA. Target stores advertise with a red dot in a red circle on a white background or with a white dot in a white circle on a red background. In some of these stores, dogs painted on the façade attract additional attention. This dog can be seen in a drawing by Wagenblast. It is painted in dark moss green and sits in front of a purple mountain and the Target logo. In a second, somewhat lighter version, you can also see the shadow of the dog. Palm trees grow in another drawing.

Wagenblast’s drawings are presented like museum pieces in frames behind glass and passe-partouts. But the passe-partouts are out of the ordinary. They are sprayed with lemon-yellow, turquoise-green and rust-red capital letters that form the words ‚PAIN IN THE ASS‘ and ‚FUNBRAKE‘. These words go back to a mock exchange of words and argument between Wagenblast and the Karlsruhe gallery owner Michael Oess on one of the streets of Palm Beach, which Wagenblast drew from his photos.

By superimposing capital letters over his composition, he is drawing on an idea that he developed and realized as early as 1998 in his New York drawing series Taxi Driver Wisdom. The title of the series is taken from the book of the same name by Risa Mickenberg, who compiled „wisdom“ from cab drivers. One of the drawings from 1998 reads above blue and yellow urban canyons and yellow cars in brownish red and brown: „TIME GOES. THAT’S IT.“

Wagenblast had painted and drawn after studying painting at the Kunstakademie Stuttgart, but then began working on figurative wood sculptures in 1992-93. His painted 32 x 38 x 34 cm wooden Target Market from 2023 with the grey dog above the roof stands in that tradition and now in the living room, his painted 67.5 x 30 x 15 cm large Man from 2023 in front of the outside door of the gallery. He looks out over our round from there. With Gerhard Richter, Wagenblast assumes that images and sculptures must be simple, a figure, an object, no more. He has adhered to this throughout his work, at least for the most part.

Inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, his 2018 island of Frauenbaumkirche, with a Madonna, a church and a tree, is therefore somewhat lush. But the double-plinthed almost black group is perceived as a unit at a distance, and thus fulfills its own premise. His 115 x 126 cm hand-drawn drawings from 2018 ask whether one really has to take everything in one’s hand and do what one can take and do. But they are also open to other interpretations. Wagenblast does one thing at a time and only what interests him. He does something for himself and nothing for the market. When his work attracts interest, he is happy.

Like his wife, Isa Dahl, Wagenblast relies on a traditional concept of work. Both start from the idea that artists should make things that last. Images should become the mirror for the viewer, the opposite, the perceptual space in which the world appears in different colours and perspectives. Both are convinced that a life’s work will remain open and evolve only if an artist lives with the possibility of permanent failure, that is, the possibility that he can break everything with a stroke or a stroke. Being an artist, then, is a permanent one, a lifetime of risking and trying. Those who fear this risk should stop. Isa Dahl met her husband in 1984 in the class of Peter Grau at the Kunstakademie Stuttgart. In 1989 she moved to the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf with Dieter Krieg, and since then she has been exploring the infinite possibilities of abstract oil painting in the formats rectangle, square, tondo and other formats. For her, the square has become the epitome of a purely abstract form, the circle the cipher for infinity.

On your way into the living room, you come across the red-dominated circular picture Bloom from 2024, centred on its centrepiece. It has a diameter of 80cm and is reminiscent of Don Quixote’s spinning and possibly wind-skewed wind wings, while others see a flower. The smaller circular picture Bloom, 40cm in diameter, points to the large-format Grow in the living room with its yellow, brown and bluish-purple brush strokes and its turquoise slit in the upper right corner. In the living room hangs Isa Dahl’s elongated, 140cm x 280cm panel Grow from 2022. With its colour, which changes from yellow to blue, it corresponds perfectly with the different yellows of the seat set.

The aforementioned square work, which oscillates between red and purple, green and yellow, bloom here in the space in the 170 x 170 cm format from 2023, the parallel blue work migration from 2021, the rusty red and yellow-brown square from the series as if in the 60 x 60 cm format from 2018, live from the fact that Isa Dahl has laid the oil paint on top of each other in thin layers of glaze on the painting’s background. That the colors mix with each other when applied and that they can continue to mix on the canvas. And that she knows how to make light appear from the picture’s background – or should I say from the original background (I am thinking of the „There will be light!“ from the story of creation). And that she can marry the calmness and movement potential of her compositions in the area of circle, square and rectangular forms and bring them to a harmonious balance.

In her early days, Isa Dahl painted paintings up to 3 x 3 meters in size, but abandoned these formats over the years for logistical reasons. Today, her focus is no longer on making paintings as large as possible, but on making paintings succeed. Good and successful paintings make her happy. If she succeeds and succeeds in a painting, she can calmly leave it to its drying process and start the next attempt. All of Isa Dahl’s previous work and every subsequent work give the viewer an insight into the making process. They are therefore ultimately narratives of the making of these paintings and thus also narratives of the painting act itself, of the space and of the time that a painting act takes and of what can become of it. – Curator Helmut Albert Müller