David Ostrowski’s emotional paintings (a solo show at Simon Lee)
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- David Ostrowski, F (Musik ist Scheisse), 2013 Painting – Acrylic and lacquer on canvas, wood 94 7/8 x 75 1/4 in. (241 x 191 cm). Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery and the artist.
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- On the right: David Ostrowski, F (A thing is a thing in a whole which it’s not), 2013 Painting – Acrylic and lacquer on canvas 94 1/2 x 74 3/4 in. (240 x 190 cm). Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery and the artist.
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- On the left: David Ostrowski, F (Musik ist Scheisse), 2013 Painting – Acrylic and lacquer on canvas, wood 94 7/8 x 75 1/4 in. (241 x 191 cm). On the right side: F (Auch die schönste Frau ist an den Füssen zu Ende, Elena’s feet), 2013 Painting – Dirt on canvas, wood 94 7/8 x 75 1/4 in. (241 x 191 cm). Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery and the artist.
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- David Ostrowski, F (Love), 2013. Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery and the artist.
The starting point of David Ostrowski’s solo show at Simon Lee, is neither the title “Yes or let’s say no”, nor the footprint on the bottom left corner of one of the canvas, but the introductive question and answer session between film maker Harmony Korine and the artist published on the gallery’s web site. Here is a perfectly working software.
What a writer such as Tom Wolf would call the smoking’ gun is that Ostrowski doesn’t talk about his artworks, but about himself, as a human being and an artist. Thus the real subject of these paintings does not lie in the pure form as it may seem at a first glance, but in the life experience the artist, with the act of giving essence to the show by this text, bestows on them – and it doesn’t matter whether the given info is trustable or not. From this point of view Ostrowski appears to be going toward Fancis Bacon, for instance, while distancing himself from Gerhard Richter or Wade Guyton for that matter. It is a field where another young artist, Ryan Foerster, is playing too. In the case of this latter one, the images are powered by the texts composed by the artist’s partner, who writes about them with a similar warm, and personal approach. The real matter that Ostrowski and Foerster are bringing back to the scene is the human being, and his/her emotions.
July 15, 2015
