David Ostrowski - The F Word

Numerous Sides of Nothing On David Ostrowski Jörg Heiser If I’ve always been nothing, with stuff embellishing it, I’d better make a slit up my skirt and start relishing it.

Jochen Distelmeyer, Eine Eigene Geschichte (1994) Before writing this essay, I prepared by watching individual episodes of the television series Seinfeld and Nashville. In episodes of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, I observed how the poker-faced comedian uses the sofa interview format to see how far Barack Obama or Brad Pitt are prepared to go in being taken for a ride as a show of both humility and self-assurance. I read books by the Polish writer, satirist and Holocaust survivor Krystyna Żywulska. I consulted a turgid outpouring on nothingness and the void in the philosophies of Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan – laying it aside again because Żywulska, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld seemed more helpful on the subject. I studied various texts on the current state of discourse on painting and, online, a number of articles on a new generation of speculative collectors who are trying to treat young artists – especially young abstract painters – like start-ups about to be floated on the stock exchange.

(This aspect, too, I laid aside when I realized how interchangeable the art in question is for these collectors, which doesn’t mean it has to be the same way for me.) I listened to music by Taylor Swift and Roc Marciano, which I recalled seeing on a stack of CDs during my visit to David Ostrowski’s studio in Cologne when we talked, among other things, about music. And finally, I looked at his work in his studio, at exhibitions in Turin and Berlin, in printed catalogues and online.

I looked at, listened to, read and did all these things because there was a direct link to Ostrowski’s art (the artist himself and his studio; the critical texts on painting between art history and the market). Or because he refers to them in titles of works or accompanying texts (e.g. the references to American comedians). Or because I was not yet sure if they would really shed any light on his painting (the music he listens to while working; books by his grandmother Krystyna Żywulska). All of these things might help get to grips with what Ostrowski does with the canvas, with the exhibition space, and thus with the viewer; but they might also be totally misleading, creating the illusion of a derivation and legitimization for something that inherently moves in a free and uncertain space, (as yet) without institutional safeguards, without a specific established pattern of interpretation.

For the art of David Ostrowski belongs to the last few years. Born in 1981, he studied in Düsseldorf with Albert Oehlen until 2009, followed by stopovers in cities including Los Angeles and New York, before moving into a large studio east of the Rhine in Cologne, near to the river and to a petrol station. Concerning the past, suffice it to say that an electrical fire at his old studio in 2009 almost totally destroyed his oil-heavy oeuvre to date, leaving just one smoke-charred canvas. By contrast, the present appears tightly strapped into the conceptual and methodical rules he has since imposed on his painting, dictated by this one fire-damaged canvas, resulting in a minimal, gestural approach. He often transforms a primed or unprimed canvas via a small number of steps (spraying a single jet from a can of paint; applying a piece of fabric) into a space that is sensorially concrete and formally abstract in equal parts. Or the canvas is painted over with the routine of a house painter, only to branch off surprisingly at the last moment. Either way, the execution of these steps seems to vary in duration between a reflex-like twinkling of an eye and a ruminating process lasting days or weeks.

Numerous Sides of Nothing On David Ostrowski Jörg Heiser If I’ve always been nothing, with stuff embellishing it, I’d better make a slit up my skirt and start relishing it.

Jochen Distelmeyer, Eine Eigene Geschichte (1994) Before writing this essay, I prepared by watching individual episodes of the television series Seinfeld and Nashville. In episodes of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, I observed how the poker-faced comedian uses the sofa interview format to see how far Barack Obama or Brad Pitt are prepared to go in being taken for a ride as a show of both humility and self-assurance. I read books by the Polish writer, satirist and Holocaust survivor Krystyna Żywulska. I consulted a turgid outpouring on nothingness and the void in the philosophies of Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan – laying it aside again because Żywulska, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld seemed more helpful on the subject. I studied various texts on the current state of discourse on painting and, online, a number of articles on a new generation of speculative collectors who are trying to treat young artists – especially young abstract painters – like start-ups about to be floated on the stock exchange.

(This aspect, too, I laid aside when I realized how interchangeable the art in question is for these collectors, which doesn’t mean it has to be the same way for me.) I listened to music by Taylor Swift and Roc Marciano, which I recalled seeing on a stack of CDs during my visit to David Ostrowski’s studio in Cologne when we talked, among other things, about music. And finally, I looked at his work in his studio, at exhibitions in Turin and Berlin, in printed catalogues and online.

I looked at, listened to, read and did all these things because there was a direct link to Ostrowski’s art (the artist himself and his studio; the critical texts on painting between art history and the market). Or because he refers to them in titles of works or accompanying texts (e.g. the references to American comedians). Or because I was not yet sure if they would really shed any light on his painting (the music he listens to while working; books by his grandmother Krystyna Żywulska). All of these things might help get to grips with what Ostrowski does with the canvas, with the exhibition space, and thus with the viewer; but they might also be totally misleading, creating the illusion of a derivation and legitimization for something that inherently moves in a free and uncertain space, (as yet) without institutional safeguards, without a specific established pattern of interpretation.

For the art of David Ostrowski belongs to the last few years. Born in 1981, he studied in Düsseldorf with Albert Oehlen until 2009, followed by stopovers in cities including Los Angeles and New York, before moving into a large studio east of the Rhine in Cologne, near to the river and to a petrol station. Concerning the past, suffice it to say that an electrical fire at his old studio in 2009 almost totally destroyed his oil-heavy oeuvre to date, leaving just one smoke-charred canvas. By contrast, the present appears tightly strapped into the conceptual and methodical rules he has since imposed on his painting, dictated by this one fire-damaged canvas, resulting in a minimal, gestural approach. He often transforms a primed or unprimed canvas via a small number of steps (spraying a single jet from a can of paint; applying a piece of fabric) into a space that is sensorially concrete and formally abstract in equal parts. Or the canvas is painted over with the routine of a house painter, only to branch off surprisingly at the last moment. Either way, the execution of these steps seems to vary in duration between a reflex-like twinkling of an eye and a ruminating process lasting days or weeks.

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