The title of our current exhibition really means what it says: we are exhibiting works by the gallery owner’s husband. Christoph Lohmann presents new works on canvas and paper, and also sculptures and a wall painting. The common denominator to all these works, put very generally, is Lohmann’s approach to the image and the material. In this case, image also means the total image of the exhibition as an installation, the image that is created for example when a particular sculpture is placed adjacent to a particular painting in a particular room. Here is a brief impression after a tour of this exhibition:

 

Some paintings are in oil on untreated canvas, consisting of dots, masks, circular shapes. Others are plaited or woven: canvas torn into strips was woven and then mounted on stretchers and painted pastose. The dominant pillar in the middle of the room was encased in canvas in the same way, turning it into a sculpture with a certain domestic touch that runs contrary to the overall atmosphere of the loft gallery. The strips of canvas that cover the pillar turn and hang down at the top, like the vegetal capitals of columns in classizist architecture. In the back room of the gallery sections of the wall are painted in a simple repetitive pattern, so that this looks like bits of wallpaper or wall tiles that have been chipped. Against the wall there is a small writing desk, with a lamp made of a cardboard tube and a simple naked light bulb, an interior from another age. Or perhaps it is the pictorial version of the description of an interior from a book? Some o f the pictures on show have holes in them, some of the works on paper are torn. The fragmentary, the gap, the hole, the negative space, the omission (on canvases and watercolours too) dominate this exhibition. The holes are also eyes, and surfaces with omissions are masks, faces, grimaces, or gorges. The effort required to be casual, the significance of the circumstantial, the beauty of the margins, the trace left by what has been left out: perhaps this is the best way to put into words the effect of these works and their presentation in this exhibition.