The Westfälische Kunstverein is hosting the Gesellschaft für Westfälische Kulturarbeit e.V. (GWK)’s advancement award for art this year and will present work by the award winner, Julia Gruner (b. 1984, Lüdenscheid). Alongside existing works, Julia Gruner will mainly show new works, some of which will be site-specific, reacting pointedly to the architecture of the exhibition space and the way it is embedded into the cityscape. One is immediately confronted in the entrance area by a large yellow pile of material reminiscent of road works: gathered-up temporary lane markings. By virtue of their very materiality and reflective quality, they create a direct connection with the space outside. In the exhibition space itself, Gruner has covered the entire length of one wall, thereby massively altering the overall impression of the space. Abstract swathes of colour extend themselves in monumental breadth. This relates to a microscopic photograph of the artist’s colour palette. Enlarged n number of times, the random splodges of paint have been removed from their original contexts and proportions. This defamiliarising strategy of supposed characteristic features and differentiations between painting and paint form a veritable golden thread through Julia Gruner’s artistic practice. When does paint become painting? She stages the act of painting in a video projection that fills an entire wall: we see and can hear the process of painting. This becomes more important than the outcome as the ultimately the viewer is left with nothing to look at.
Julia Gruner explores the traditional boundaries and definitions of painting in order to overcome them. As a result, she also produces a series of small, reserved works, which, initially at any rate, are clearly (seemingly found) objects, but which ultimately reveal themselves to be paintings, i.e. “skin” made out of dried acrylic paint. The leitmotif of paint as a surface, boundary and also a container is not only prevalent in Julia Gruner’s thematic and contextual engagement with painting but also often in the titles of the works themselves. In a variety of approaches, Gruner traces thus a thoroughly humorous actualisation of this time-honoured game surrounding the illusionistic qualities of painting.

Julia Gruner completed her fine art degree at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Katharina Grosse in 2015 and is currently living in Cologne.

^{Ill.: „3,14 km“, 2016 | road markings | photo: Hanna Neander}