Rainer Gross

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Overview

Madras 2-24, 2024

Acrylic on canvas
66 × 51 cm
Signed, dated and titled on the verso
Provenance:
Studio of the artist
Rainer Gross "Madras 2-24" is part of a new series by the artist begun in early 2024, which includes both watercolours and paintings worked with acrylic on canvas and bears the overarching title "Madras". In this series, Gross works with the principle of "doubling" (Gross). Strips of colour of different widths are superimposed when the support is rotated, which leads to a visual intensification of the colours, as shown in the composition Madras 2-24. This is based on the proximity of certain colours, their mixture and their interplay when the paint is applied transparently. The brushwork shows partly vertical, partly horizontal structures, which contributes to the vibrancy of the colour stripes.
As in his "Contact Paintings", Rainer Gross's new series "Madras" is also concerned with aspects immanent to art, the creative means of a work of art. These include the materials used, the colours, forms, lines, the composition and ultimately the expression of a work of art in the interplay of the creative means, its "structure of forces". The work of art is what it is, has its own aesthetics and does not point beyond itself to a possible extra-pictorial context. It is an art based on sensual experience. Gross's work stands in the tradition of non-representational art, art that no longer depicts objects of visible reality. However, as Rudolf Arnheim writes, non-representational art "only does what art has always done. Every successful work shows a structure of forces whose meaning is as immediately recognisable as in Michelangelo's story of the first man." Anette Brunner