Max Frintrop at Berthold Pott

Artist: Max Frintrop

Exhibition title: Ich bin ein Bild

Venue: Berthold Pott, Cologne, Germany

Date: November 18, 2021 – January 8, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Berthold Pott, Cologne

At the center of Max Frintrop’s exhibition are six large formats developed one after the other. From a formal point of view, these paintings captivate the viewer with an opposing oscillation between transparency and density. Impulsive settlements, which flow out lava-like on the white, neutral canvases, where they accumulate and darken or become more and more translucent in their watery loss of pigment density, create a complex pictorial tectonics. The formations, rich in contrast and executed in large sweeps, which the artist creates with extended brushes on the painting surfaces lying on the floor, appear as impenetrability without boundaries, but also as precise creations defined by sharp edges and recesses – at times counterpointed by splashes of paint placed over a wide area. While the exhibition also includes smaller paintings that demonstrate a more richly explored colorism, the six large formats exhibit a more restrained colorfulness or one that is focused on blue tones as well as attempts to follow an even more strictly oriented mode of execution.

The goal of the dynamic, also physically conditioned painting process is the creation of ever new constellations – without already tried and tested compositional patterns again and again, or only in minimal deviation. The image-making forces can be controlled only to a limited extent by the artist – who must rely on his intuition, or on the fact that the picture arises to a certain extent “out of itself” – because the immediacy of the watercolor Alla Prima technique basically allows no subsequent corrections.

If one deals with the historical derivation of Max Frintrop’s works, one can understand them as contemporary manifestations of gestural-abstract painting, which dominated the 1940s and 1950s – in America, but also in the form of a European reception. What distinguishes Frintrop’s painterly approach from this distant era of advanced postwar modernism is a painterly gesture that can be described as “airy” and even “elegant” compared to the more brute approaches of his “fathers”, or “grandfathers”. Certainly, one can speak of a connection to the painting tradition of the Rhineland, but Max Frintrop’s artistic products do not merge into the so called Informal painting of a Karl Otto Götz or into Sigmar Polke’s ironic-hallucinogenic color gradients. In contrast, Frintrop demonstrates a form of existence of color that seems to be possible in its intensity only in the 21st century.

The existential aspect of Max Frintrop’s painting, by the way, already becomes clear with the exhibition title “I am a picture”, which is to be read in a differentiated way. In addition to an area of tension that opens up between pathetic self-assurance and succinct statement, the painting process itself is named as an existential one, and even the viewers can feel thrown back on the question of how their pictoriality is.

-Thomas Groetz