Lot 536: l - MARTIN KOBE

B. 1973
UNTITLED

70 3/4 by 114 1/8 in. 179.7 by 289.9 cm.

signed and dated 2003 on the reverse

acrylic on canvas

PROVENANCE

Galerie Liga, Berlin
Acquired by the present owner from the above

EXHIBITED

Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Sieben Mal Malerei, April - June 2003
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum Selections, April - August 2004

NOTE

The paintings of Martin Kobe are not directed by constructivist principles, whereby "construction is to be understood as a co-ordinating principle." For it is not the planes in his work that construct an intended unity of the space, which is pictorially impossible. And, it is this very dissonant feature that distinguishes his paintings from conventional tropes of modernism. The painter Martin Kobe, it might be said, has returned to that most insipient of post-modern principles, highlighting the condition of painting out of which the modern became a singular determinism or trajectory. In this way he has been able to revivify the process of painting, less concerned with issues of problem resolution in favor of question formation. He certainly does not believe he has come to some final aesthetic solution. Conversely, through the daily conundrum of doubt (a central concern of critical practice), he has been able to begin again to question what might be the meaning of a three-dimensional illusion when expressed on a two-dimensional surface. The final distinction being that through the viewing of his paintings one becomes a complicit participant in phenomenological concerns with which they are underpinned.

- Mark Gisbourne (Painting as Doubt and the Architecture of Impossibility, 2004)