THE INDISPENSABLE EXPERIENCE OF ART

André Stempfel—Pino Pinelli—André de Jong—Mary Sue—Elsa Tomkowiak

25 Nov 2020 – 31 Jan 2021

This cross-generational show highlights how—notwithstanding their distinctive work—five artists share a predilection for material texture and non-linear geometry to mold color into a powerful language. Adventurous and socially surprising art making at its best. PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: ANDRÉ STEMPFEL, PINO PINELLI, ANDRÉ DE JONG, MARY SUE, ELSA TOMKOWIAK.

EVENTS
Curator tours led by Marsha Plotnitsky, Fall 2020 – Winter 2021 / Amsterdam Gallery Weekend, 26-29 Nov 2020

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André de Jong has been pushing the limits of drawing in his magisterial oeuvre for over five decades. Strikingly, his mostly black-and-white drawn images unfold in the luminous colors and vital forms of nature in our imagination. Pino Pinelli is renowned for his “pittura con corpo,” or painting with an “invitation to touch”: rhythmic wall cadences of palpable plaster marked by his idiosyncratic color and hand imprint. André Stempfel is an iconoclastic reinterpreter of concrete art. He is a creator of poetic art objects of liberating and ludic minimality, most recently reduced to a simple shape and one color—yellow.

PINO PINELLI

ANDRÉ DE JONG

They are joined by two younger artists, who entered the art world post-2000, but are also on a mission to experiment with color. Mary Sue uses color to a poignant effect in performances rendered as videos, photographs, and drawings. Elsa Tomkowiak is a painter who dares to emphasize the functional value of color and abstraction in her massive wall works and large-scale installations.

With the work of these artists of different generations, the group show also deepens TMH’s inquiry into contemporary painting. Their original, boldly provocative deployment of color in relation to surface explodes a painting’s image as a commercial object on display. It is pictorial practice that not only inspires reflection on the changing role of the medium but reaches to our joint emotional realm—art for a shared experience or for an inspiring moment of reflection on one’s own.

ANDRÉ STEMPFEL

MARY SUE