Schwarze Tulpen by Jakob Kirchmayr

Artwork Description

Original title of the artwork: Schwarze Tulpen / Black tulips

"Along the border of being" is a line of text that Jakob Kirchmayr has written in one of his new works. It comes from the poem "The Stones" by the Swedish poet and Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. You can see ice crusts, frozen dark soil, yellow sky from which it rains stones. The colors, the mood and the light give an image of the north, as is often inherent in the poems of Tranströmer. The stones, used metaphorically for human actions in the poem, fall to the ground through this landscape, which for the poet is nothing more than man himself.

Kirchmayr does not stretch the cotton painting cloths in any frame. Washed and undissolved, partly the loosely hanging threads gathered, they look like relief cards in places after applying the color. For example, a landscape built up in several painting and drawing layers with black and blue surfaces turns into a mountain range of the north. The two-dimensional planes emerge from their surface, the paintings get sculptural character. The situation is similar with the paperwork, which waves, becomes flexible and gradually hardens into spatial objects during processing.

His works get rid of the usual limits of the presentation, they open the view of a field that extends far beyond the edge of the picture, further than the picture initially dictates. The lines of flight are designed in such a way that they emerge from the image carriers.