Just What Is Not Is Possible

Museum Folkwang presents an exhibition that explodes the confines of the picture frame, transforms the perspective of the exhibition space and draws attention to the spatial quality of painting.

Just What Is Not Is Possible, entitled after a line from a 1996 song by the German band ‘Einstürzende Neubauten’, has rounded up works that are characterized by openness and reflection. Painting can be experienced as a space itself or as a spatial object. While making multiple references to reality at the same time.

With Franz Ackermann and Johannes Wohnseifer the museum has invited two artists who have been a decisive influence in the painting scene. As a prelude to the exhibition, Niele Toroni realized a new, site-specific installation. By reducing his painting to the imprint of the paintbrush on canvas, in the 1960s Niele Toroni made a radical escape from the confines of the panel picture. In his spatial arrangements, Johannes Wohnseifer intertwines painted, layered pictures with textual fragments and objects. While Franz Ackermann uses photographs and drawings (which he makes on his travels and while wandering through cities) as the basis for his large murals that wrap around the exhibition space. Wolfgang Flad‘s pieces, on the other hand, oscillate between medium and object – occasionally visitors even get the chance to put them into practice. Cornelia Baltes uses humour to extend the traditional notion of the canvas painting by introducing interactions with the exhibition context. While Nicolas Party overcomes the conventions of the white museum space with a minimalist structure that obscures the walls like wallpaper. Karla Black‘s extensive creations made of such materials as transparent cellophane or coloured Vaseline emancipate themselves from the two-dimensional plane and hover somewhere between painting and sculpture. Similarly difficult to grasp is the painterly materiality in the abstract works of Marieta Chirulescus, a result of multiple reproduction processes. Finally, Simon Dybbroe Møller investigates the impact of painting on Modern art by crafting complex installations the objects of which cannot be linked to any classical medium.