Astrid Schröder

Picture by altrofoto Regensburg

Astrid Schröder

Born 1962 in Germany where she lives and works

Represented by the Galerie La Ligne since 2022

Works by Astrid Schröder

The Fascination of the Minimal

To ask about the current status of painting is probably not out of place in view of the manifold growth of the art landscape. On a superficial view, it seems to have blossomed - as one of the oldest art genres - at the end of the 20th century. In the exhibition business as well as among the jury proposals for various honours, the proportion of young painters is becoming increasingly rare. But if you look closely, you will notice that today, nevertheless, independent positions from the generation of thirty to forty-year-olds are making very intensive efforts to explore the essence of painting. The question of innovation (which we have made a habit of asking in the inventive history of modernism and postmodernism) has no place here; nor does the question of the legitimacy of heritage. It is inevitable to pick up where we left off; radicalism in its pure form is no longer possible in a subject that offers acute extremes such as minimalism and gestural expressionism among many other styles at the same time. The understanding of painting today is not defined chronologically (on the basis of a change of style), as it used to be, but actually in the sense of the juxtaposition of phenomena, such as a landscape. Freed from the obligation to be avant-garde by the immense possibilities of the new visual electronic media, painting today can concentrate entirely on itself. Methodology and empathy with the subject matter come to the fore. Those who paint are ready for (self-)immersion. Painting is not a quick business, and if it is, it requires long preparation.

Astrid Schröder approaches the medium with the seriousness that these guidelines suggest. Over a long period of time, she developed her reduced pictorial language from gestural and motoric forms. These are line paintings that deny any emotion, that are created entirely under the sign of methodology and its effect. The reduction that dominates this way of working is perhaps something that every painter longs for at least one moment in his or her career. To move close to zero, to strip away everything superfluous, to grasp painting from nothing. A path of purification that remained the royal road for many.

To fill a picture line by line, always with the same approach, has something of meditation. The artist works with the ruler, which is applied in parallel again and again at the edge of the picture. With this method, she differs from an older generation for whom meditative "handwork" was important. But even with her, the ruler does not serve as a precision instrument: it is merely an aid that still leaves enough room for the changing ductus of the hand and the brush. If the aim were to create a line picture as precise as possible, there would certainly be better methods. But it is precisely the irregularity in the regularity that is important here.

Fascination with the processes of randomness is a driving force for the painter. The calculation that goes hand in hand with the orderly framework of horizontal or vertical parallels is rendered invalid by the uncontrollable micro-events that manual work triggers. When the brush (or the pencil in the case of the drawings) is applied and the line is drawn, minute shifts occur, the sum of which makes up the overall impression of the texture of the painting. Thus, for example, in the brushstrokes drawn in a 6-cm grid, there are not only iridescent colour effects, but also vertical furrows, reminiscent of the arbitrariness of natural formations. Comparable to Roman Opalka's number paintings, in which the slowly decreasing saturation of the brush with colour rhythmises the pictorial structure, the lines of these paintings are also determined by the increasingly transparent colour gradient. Dramaturgy is created by the overlapping of saturated and unsaturated traces of colour - especially in paintings in which the lines cascade like voices in a canon. Colour matter is dominant, but colourfulness as such hardly plays a role: the paintings are mostly in two tones, light on dark or vice versa.

The drawings illustrate the microscopic processes even more clearly. The pencil does not lie and does not smudge anything - the irregularities of seams, edges and texture of the lined surfaces are exemplary of the individual and random nature of an action. In some series, a different thickness of pencil is used for each sheet; as with the application of paint, much attention is paid to the materiality of the graphite. The result is sheets of peculiar beauty in which one can read for a long time. With the drawing of a line, a direction is always indicated; in the multiplication of the act, dynamic processes are thus created that constitute the essence of these pictures. Whether the movement is symmetrically laid out from the outside or whether it runs from top to bottom: the construction always appears as a complex whole. Sometimes the individual elements merge into a shimmering carpet, as if the picture surface were vibrating slightly. In other pictures, the pulsating, rhythmic element is predominant. The comparison with a piece of music is obvious: a self-contained composition in which individual notes, bundled into strands of melody, create a carpet of sound. In this case, it would probably be the peculiar beauty of minimal music, which through its reduction represents something very elementary, such at the same time the result of high sensitisation.

Barbara Rollmann-Boretty 1997

Public collections (Selection)

Bayerisches Wirtschaftsministerium München

Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, München

Technische Fachhochschule, Deggendorf

Staatliches Hochbauamt Passau

Grafische Sammlung der Bauten des Bundes in Berlin:

Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung

Bundesministerium der Justiz

Sammlung, Museen der Stadt Regensburg

Städtische Sammlung der Stadt Regensburg

Staatliches Hochbauamt Passau

Sammlung, Europäisches Patentamt, Den Haag NL

Sammlung, Europäisches Patentamt, München

Sammlung, Bezirk Oberpfalz

Kunstsammlung Allianz SE, München

Kunstsammlungen des Bistums Regensburg

Grafik Fondation Vera Röhm, Lausanne

Pinakothek der Moderne, München

Städtische Sammlung der Stadt Amberg

Forum Konkrete Kunst, Museen der Stadt Jena

Collection Winfried Wuensch, Linz AT