Donald Judd, Richard Paul Lohse, Klaus Mettig

Donald Judd (Excelsior Springs, Missouri, USA, 1928 – New York, USA, 1994) once declared that “Politics alone should be democratic (…) art is intrinsically a matter of quality”, a statement that reflects his profound distaste for the way consumerism and the mass-produced objects of a consumer society interfere with our perception of the world. Judd’s criticism is all the more powerful because his art actively engages with mass production and its standardised, homogenous codes, utilising the latest manufactured materials to create a self-reflexive platform whose aesthetic, when deliberately scrutinised, becomes an ethical and political tool.

Judd’s serial structures employ basic colours, forms, volumes and materials to highlight the quality of the surface itself; the sculptures are integrated into the surrounding space within a single optical and tactile dimension. In a similar vein, the canvases of Richard Paul Lohse (Zurich, Switzerland, 1902–1988) provide a social comment on contemporary visual language. For Lohse, a pioneering graphic designer who was influenced by the Constructivist aesthetic, the objective use of series and of variations in colour and form (by which the pictorial medium, the surface of the canvas, and the anonymity and objectivity of the composition are all unified in a single process), are an expression of the structures of civilisation itself and of the sensibility of the modern era.

Klaus Mettig (Brandenburg, Germany, 1950) produces photographic installations that are intensely graphic and present documentary reality in its crudest form, leading the viewer to reflect on the nature of the gaze, which is drawn to the very confines of objectivity and abstraction.

Curated by Rudi Fuchs