Chris Newman
Recent Painting Mates II, 1997-98

Artist
Chris Newman

Title
Recent Painting Mates II

Year of creation
1997-98

Technique and dimensions
acrylic on cotton, 200 x 300 cm

Year of acquisition
2005

Chris Newmann was born in London in 1958. He studied music in London from 1976 to 1979. In 1979 he wrote his own poems. In 1980 he studied at the University of Music in Cologne with Mauricio Kagel. In 1983 he founded the rock group “Janet Smith”. His first paintings began in 1989. In 2001 he took over a professorship for sculpture (with performance and installation) at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. He lives and works in Berlin.

The painting by the composer, poet and painter Chris Newman comes from a series of 11 paintings, each in two parts, which examine painting as a direct expression in a gestural, psychographic structure. Newman is not concerned with using subjects, nor with any form of narrative. Because he applies the colors with his eyes closed and does not allow any conscious correction, his painting is outside of any considered "tasteful" or decorative image concept. The image, as an act of blind action, achieves, as it were, an unconscious form that seems to deny any authorship. Through this form of “anti-painting,” Newman attempts to radically open up new avenues for the painting that is so popular today. His pictures are beyond any sentimental reflection, but they do not deny their anchoring in the tradition of painting. They remain in an ambivalent intermediate form, which Newman also strives for in his compositions.

Eugen Blume

"As with so many of my works - including those that use other media - these paintings represent an attempt to make concrete the relationship between an inside and its outside, between thinking and its material environment, not just about one To find an equivalent to the concrete visual relationship, but also to concretize the relationship itself (in which the truth lies) into something solid, not simply to create a visual equivalent of it, but a work that corresponds to that concrete relationship itself The matter itself - existential phrases and their visual definitions (which both reveal and conceal), an 'inside' and an 'outside' in itself, sketchy and personal - is depicted enlarged so that the painting gains control over its origins. takes on a shaky life of its own, but at the same time remains on a level that is not too far removed from real life and its origins, but just far enough to make it a painting."

Chris Newman