The German Connection. Kuhnert, 1965 - 2015
to zero, a resetting to zero, although Kuhnert’s search is distant from the negativity, or the nihilism at worst, of the Zero Group. The use of a non-artistic material opened new aesthetic possibilities for art. _______In fact, polyester was not only a non-artistic material, but more radically, a non-material due to its liquid nature, its lack of a predetermined structure, of that resistance to contact that is a specific quality of material according to the history of sculpture. The plasticity of polyester (the same thing is valid for alabaster plaster) goes in parallel to its historic availability: the lack of a past and the lack of physical resistance go together. _______In addition, the chromatic range of polyester should not be forgotten: with the intense colors that are transformed according to the falling of light on the surface of the work, light became a “projection factor” once again. Lastly, this industrial material allowed for the creation of exact and sharp corners, not rounded ones, like those of the objects of design, while the work continues to be the result of manual work. _______Ultimately, shape appeared as an intrinsic quality of the material. While polyester has also been used in the field of hyperrealist sculpture – by Duane Hanson and Charles Ray – the case of the minimalist John 74
_______In fact, these would not have come to light without the discovery of polyester, which was adopted after having thought first of plaster casts, which were too heavy, however, to be hung vertically on walls like paintings. A discovery that coincides with the abandonment of painting, at least as a traditional medium. From that point on, a deep dissociation is made between making a painting and the presence of the easel canvas, which would deserve an in-depth analysis. _______That painting disappears, or rather, that retinal painting, associated with the smell of turpentine, disappears, does not necessarily mean that canvases are abandoned. This dissociation, instead, coincides with a deepening of abstract painting in a previously unexplored direction. At the time polyester was an industrial material, foreign to the artistic sphere, mainly used in mines and in the automobile industry for vehicle bodies. _______On the postwar European scene, it was of decisive importance for Kuhnert to make use of a material without history: “Firstly, I experimented with various materials such as clay, wood, metal, sand, etc., and then I discovered colorless liquid polyester resin – Nothingness as material!”. Nothingness as material: this is the emergence of the call back
The German Connection. Horst Kuhnert: Nothingness as material?
McCracken should not be forgotten. In a similar way to Kuhnert, the Californian artist also reaches the same point by observing the bodies of cars and their finishing, work which is made easier by being in Los Angeles, with its cult of cars and custom cars. McCracken spoke of cars as “moving splinters of paint, hints of color on wheels”3. _______Could he in fact be describing one of his abstract sculptures or their effect on the viewer? In conclusion, the points of contact between Kuhnert’s extroflexions and those in Italian art remain to be investigated. Without a doubt they involve Agostino Bonalumi: specifically in 1965 – the year in which Kuhnert began using polyester – Bonalumi held his first individual exhibition in Germany, at the Thelen Gallery in Essen. _______The lucidity of the text of Udo Kultermann is admirable: “The nature of this art is severe, the generally symmetric manifestation of the means of painting in the constantly changing flow of fluid light simultaneously expresses both permanence and change. _______The ritual constriction of color, the moving order with clear laws, and radical simplification bring such paintings close to magic symbols. As in the latter, the artistic effect is born of the tension between Riccardo Venturi