Opening: 10th of October 2020, 3 – 10 PM
Duration: 11th of October – 29th of November 2020

Attention: Due to the current situation we will refrain from a welcome and introduction on this occasion.

Titled separate | related, NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein is showing a solo exhibition of new works by the artist Markus Saile, which were created for the TWODO collectors group.

The exhibition title refers in several ways to the theme of relational hanging, which Saile has been dealing with for quite some time. The terms separate and related describe two different modes of how elements within a picture as well as pictures on the wall and between walls in a room can relate to each other. The apparent contrast between being separate and related, which is hinted at in the title, however, proves itself to be a necessary condition of a relation, in which new constellations can constantly be formed from individual works. For the vertical line – known in English as a pipe – is a typographical sign that makes the connection between what is divorced by it just as clear as it seems to undermine it at the same time.

It also refers to a few narrow, upright-format images that form caesuras in the context of the hanging at NAK. They allude to the function of each picture – comparable to a sociological observation – to negotiate affiliations through distances and formats.

In this way, Saile incidentally refers to an idea originally communicated in the principle of the TWODO Collection: the works in the exhibition they initiated are each conceived as a closed whole, are distributed among the collectors after the end of the presentation and, if possible, reunited in good time. The exhibition title thus implicitly refers to the future dispersion of the individual works.

Broken colors, diluted in oil with turpentine, applied in numerous layers on a small-format wooden background – Markus Sailes works are intangible, fleeting, abstract, whereby a painterly gesture may develop figuratively without ever becoming concrete. The gestural structures in the pictures function as agents who, through their interrelated movements, open up interrelationships of space and time, step a before behind the after or allow reflection on the relativity of spatial positions such as “front” and “back”.

The edges of the image carriers with their layered color deposits bear witness to the process of the work’s creation. The picture is always also an object at the same time, whereby Saile is interested precisely in the tilting moment between these two modes. The question of the object character that painting can assume is posed by the artist in the exhibition in a particularly targeted manner with the pipes in their narrow, stretched formats. Their proportions go to the limits of what is generally still perceived as a picture surface.

Markus Saile was born in Stuttgart in 1981. He studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and was a master student of Frances Scholz. In 2014 Saile was one of the founders of the project space PiK Deutz in Cologne, for which he also curated exhibitions such as Field of Codes. Most recently, he presented in the group exhibition Jetzt! Junge Malerei in Deutschland at Museum Gunzenhauser of the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Museum Wiesbaden, Kunstmuseum Bonn and Deichtorhallen Hamburg. He lives and works in Cologne.

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