ULTRAKONTINENTAL

June 12 - July 5, 2014

Odon Wagner Contemporary is pleased to present our first solo exhibition for German abstract artist, Jan Kolata. 

ULTRAKONTINENTAL will feature Kolata's latest colour saturated abstract paintings and runs from JUNE 12 – JULY 5, 2014.

View Catalogue Online: Click Here

Opening Reception with artist: Thursday, June 12, 6-9pm

RSVP to Reception: Click Here

Excerpt by Bernd Finkeldey:

"One of Jan Kolata’s groups of works is on canvas, which takes up colour, quasi soaks it up, becomes dyed with it. The artist himself claims his credo to be: “painting is like cleaning”. And he sticks to it, mixing the paint needed for his works himself. Initially oil with casein, then acrylic paint with casein and nowadays only acrylic paint that he dilutes and pours onto the substrate. In so doing, it is in his power to form pools of paint, create rivulets, make outlets, let fresh paint repeatedly rain over the substrate and the first layer of paint, to form parallel or even complementary runs. Pools and rivulets are then smeared, smudged or dabbed with a cloth to create surfaces within the painting and to combine the individual layers of paint. 

What we finally get to see are organic-looking planes of colour that hover weightlessly in their given pictorial space. One might feel reminded of a deep-sea underwater world, but who has actually seen one to make the comparison? Let us therefore stick to a certain degree of realism and view his paintings for and as themselves. His works draw the eye to patches of homogeneous colour, to transparent layers of varnish that show other layers lying beneath, ultimately letting the viewer see into the depths of the painting without ever reaching the bottom. Imagery thus appears before our eyes that is not only fascinating, but also poses a challenge for both eyes as well as the entire active grey matter of the viewer. 
This is also true of the new group of paintings that Jan Kolata has been creating on primed canvas or on polyester. The paint the artist pours onto the substrate and then removes using the sort of squeegee used for cleaning buildings initially leaves only a few traces and smears of colour on such a surface. It takes several repetitions before a certain degree of colour consolidation can be achieved. 

Jan Kolata pours pools of colour, pulls them apart, lets them expand and grow. He wipes paint off to reduce the size of these pools, he over-paints them with broad brush strokes, only to partially remove them again with a sweep of the squeegee, ultimately creating planes of colour while uncovering other, transparent layers. He works in an intuitive manner, sometimes even unintentionally. But this technique lets him create paintings of complex colours, of complementary contrasts, of colours that blend and mix materially and visually, of surfaces and pictorial spaces, of designated and exposed layers of colour, all of which contribute to the overall appearance of his paintings and together let them shine. Jan Kolata creates paintings for binocular viewing and multidimensional visual perception. These are then, as Hockney might well agree, truly exciting perspectives and challenges for the human visual experience."

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