In this course we will develop practice oriented strategies to approach the pictorial space through various painting and drawing exercises. We move against the notion of abstraction as a particular style. Rather, we use abstraction as a methodology, in the original sense of the word abstrahere: to pull off, to drag away, to tear away and to move away from something, possibly from ourselves. Through various painting and drawing minute-exercises within the group, we aim to sharpen our own seeing and artistic decision-making, and thus explore painterly/drawing strategies on the single paper aka the painting support aka the pictorial space. Our discoveries or even zero findings, are to be sorted, debated, exchanged among each other and looked at more closely. In the next step we deepen questions about image-finding or the organization of the pictorial space. We try out and therby provoke also failure - in a laboratory-like setting we concentrate mainly on the process. The focus here is therefore not an authorial painting and the production of a singular work, but the experiment and openness towards co-operation within as well as together with the group. As a starting condition we explicitly do not work with oil on canvas, but use utensils that are suitable for many quick exercises. Water-based paint, oil pastels, pastels, colored pencil, pencil, graphite, felt-tip pen, ballpoint pen on paper, cardboard, and wood.

The course is inspired by works and methods of the following artists*: Prunella Clough, Amy Sillman, Rochelle Feinstein, Janet Sobel, Agnes Martin, Etel Adnan, Behjat Sadr, Deborah Remington, Sonia Gechtoff, Dorr Bothwell, R.H. Quaytman, Bernice Bing, MIchaela Eichwald, and many more ..

Active participation and regular attendance

Presentation of produced works