MARCIA THOMPSON
INSCAPE
Thompson's paintings are predicated on expansion: the gestural work of the brush is gone, the painting is literally transposed into another dimension. The color itself is staged as an event, as a mass, as an object. We are confronted with bodies of color with a canvas core.
The color becomes thick, it stretches, it breaks out, intervenes and creates a space of its own, which disregards the pictorial space, the canvas and the stretcher frame as much as the human proportions or the eye level.
The painting becomes independent of the experience of volume and space. The block of accumulated color establishes its own realm. This realm of the pictorial is the visible trace of the imagination, a space for thought within the dimensions of concrete space.
INSCAPE reveals the current strengths of painting. It is precisely here - in its quiet reserves, from which they emerge unexpectedly and help boost the flagging Zeitgeist - that one can find a reason why painting, despite all the challenges and despite some hostilities (to which the medium was exposed, in parallel to the transformations of an advancing Modernity), continues to impose itself cheekily.
Exhibition opening speech: Christoph Tannert, artistic director Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.
INSCAPE: Isabelle Borges, Joanna Buchowska, Jessica Buhlmann, Sophia Schama, Marcia Thompson, Kunsthaus Erfurt, 16.12.2016