Enter the Void – On Abstraction and Elliptical Strategies in Painting

About

This practical one week seminar focuses on the individual artistic exploration of abstraction processes within painting, the development of unique pictorial ideas and a vivid dialogue among the participants.

In a world saturated with images and information, this seminar challenges ideas of ‘enough’, by reducing form, colour and content as a way to develop consistent manners of painting.

Berlin’s empty lots, architectural gaps and silent spaces - places often perceived as abandoned or incomplete - become sites where ‘enough’ is redefined: enough space to breathe, to imagine and, most important, to evoke meaning through absence.

Taking Berlin’s abandoned listening station at Teufelsberg (Field Station Berlin on the cities highest lookout) and its architectural structures, views, insights and outsides as our starting point, the participants will investigate how abstraction processes of reduction, omission and elliptical strategies can help to develop individual artistic languages in painting.

Back in the studio, the painterly approach can be both playful and systematic, combining clear cuts with painterly gestures or experimenting with the grammar of different pictorial languages. Exploring Berlin’s urban structures and landscapes will lead to a huge number of different image ideas for the seminar. Practical exercises alternate with reflective phases and art theoretical impulses. A visit to Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie will offer a context for understanding how abstraction has been used to negotiate presence and absence, abundance and emptiness within the painting history of 20th century modernism. Ultimately, this seminar invites artists to cultivate a practice that finds richness in reduction, assuming that sometimes ‘enough’ is enough

Course leader

Matthias Moravek

Target group

knowledge requirements: basic drawing skills

equipment requirements: sketchbook, drawing tools, brushes, acrylic paint, tape and paper will be provided and are included in the seminar fee

Fee info