Günter Umberg: German Artist to Present His First Solo Museum Exhibition in U.S. at the BUSCH-REISINGER

A special exhibition of work by Günter Umberg will be on display in the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, from May 23 through August 24, 1997. Born in 1942 in Bonn, Germany and now working in Cologne, Umberg is one of the leading contemporary painters who investigate questions of abstraction, perception, materiality and physicality in their work. This installation, the artist's first solo museum show in North America, has been made possible by the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Günter Umberg is organized by Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator, Busch-Reisinger Museum.

This two-gallery installation, designed by the artist especially for the spaces in the Busch-Reisinger Museum, presents eleven of Umberg's extraordinarily beautiful monochrome paintings, almost all of them black. The artist laboriously builds up the surfaces of his pictures with several dozen layers of dry pigment and a resin binder, brushed onto aluminum sheets or shaped wooden panels. These paintings are then carefully placed by the artist in spaces which he has altered to enhance the experience of perception and the engagement with the painted color. Umberg has added an angled wall to one of the exhibition galleries, in the other he has largely sheathed the walls with a maple covering.

Umberg's paintings draw the viewer in, yet simultaneously resist the penetrating eye with their autonomy. The attentive viewer will experience the painted color surface somewhere between its granular physicality and its elusive spatiality. The comfortable scale and careful placement of the works in the exhibition (usually one work on each wall) will enable a face-to-face dialogue between the individual viewer and the individual painting.

Umberg has been painting monochrome black paintings since the 1970s. At times he employs various blue and green pigments to unfold and display the wealth of painterly possibilities that lie in black. Concerning his use of black pigments, Umberg stated in an interview in 1992: "For me it is never a question of whether a painting consists or yellows, reds, blues, greens, etc., but how color enters into the painting. Regarded in this way, the black in my paintings emerges from the way in which I have handled and continue to handle the painting material, the various black, as well as blue and green pigments. My practice of painting is a matter not of smearing or spreading black pigment across the surface, but of building up color. As I relate color to its concrete, material appearance, rather than a visual phenomenon, the color spectrum has no relevance for me....I think that in handling other pigments, one has the experience that their quality of color is irrelevant to or even overshadows their material character. Many artists and viewers are not aware of the importance of this distinction."

"I have been enormously impressed with the visual intensity and artistic intelligence of Günter Umberg's painting," stated Peter Nisbet, "and we are very honored that he has agreed to present his first solo North American museum exhibition at the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Visitors to the exhibition will have an ideal chance to engage with his explorations of color as material and its transformation into the occasion for the perceptual, almost bodily experience of painting."

The paintings by Umberg that will be on display in the Busch-Reisinger date from 1986 to 1997. They range in size from about 10 by 12 inches to 3 1/2 square feet.

RELATED EVENTS

Gallery Talks
Gallery talks are free with the price of admission to the Art Museums. Admission is free on Saturday mornings from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Sunday, June 15
with Sara Krajewski, Werner and Maren Otto Curatorial Intern, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Busch-Reisinger, 2:00 p.m.

Saturday, July 12
with Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Busch-Reisinger, 11:30 a.m.

Saturday, July 19
with Dorothy Lavine, former Art Museums docent. Busch-Reisinger, 11:30 a.m.

Sunday, August 3
with Tawney Becker, curatorial assistant, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Busch-Reisinger, 2:00 p.m.