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The title of the exhibition quotes the fifth sentence in Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art, a book first published in 1969. The exhibition shows works by six emerging artists, primarily from Denmark and Germany, some of whom, such as Pernille Kapper Williams and Lasse Schmidt Hansen, finished their studies at the renowned art academy Stadelschule in Frankfurt this year.

All six artists work with the conceptual aspects of formalism as it relates to forms of presentation, and all participated in the recent exhibition “Formalismus” in the Hamburger Kunstverein in 2004. In addition, the artists share an interest in the now neglected utopian, irrational side of modern art, which Sol LeWitt, in the first of his famous Sentences, described with the words: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”

This next generation of artists is less concerned with the inherited reading of modern art than with exactly those fractures and byways of Modernism in which its utopian dimensions surface. Common for these artists is a fascination with the inheritance from Minimalism and conceptual tendencies of the 1960s, a weakness for conceptual gestures and an abstract formal vocabulary.

The obvious contradiction contained in the title, to logically follow irrational thoughts, can thus be considered as programmatic for the exhibited works. Because precisely in the turning back to the mystical quality of art, emphasised in the writings of Sol LeWitt, the intrusion of the real references to fashion, everyday life, design or popular culture can be implemented in abstract images.

While Anja Schwrer in her seemingly esoteric paintings, made by bleaching and dyeing black canvas, “thematicizes” spiritualist levels of meaning in abstract art and mathematics; Simon Dybbroe Mller, in the three photographs still untitled, stages an improvised appropriation of aesthetic principles from a photographic documentation of a work situation in his studio.

In her text works that are reminiscent of visual poetry and the experimental design of early conceptual art, Pernille Kapper Williams deals with different typographies and forms of presentation. On one of the 16 pages making up the work Untitled, for example, the corresponding pair of words inside and outside are positioned so that inside is written in the o of outside. Thus the result is a formal spatial composition that all but makes a visual double to the linguistic content. Her mirror work Untitled Picture is a re-make of the work Untitled Mirror by Art & Language, which she has altered so that the size of the mirror relates exactly to her body size.

Lasse Schmidt Hansen will be represented by works on paper and the sculpture Notes on Site-Specificity, which consists of Barcelona stools designed by Mies van der Rohe placed at an angle to each other in the exhibition space. The apparently arbitrary placement of the stools thwarts the strictly geometrical positioning along the wall that was originally intended by Mies van der Rohe for his Barcelona Pavilion.

The large-format ink jet prints by Kerstin Stoll oscillate between northern light and rayonism; through their extraordinarily dense surface structure they possess a curious power of attraction. Her Basilisk table sculpture of burned clay covered in a metallic glossy glaze alludes to meditation objects of the Far East and on alchemical experiments.

The New York artist Anthony Howard mocks the visual clichés of a Modernism that is frozen into pure formulaic pathos in his parody on early performance and body art. His 16mm film Oui We, which he made for his graduation from the Pratt Institute in New York, thus seems, as is the case with the whole exhibition, to confirm Sol LeWitt’s third sentence: Irrational judgements lead to new experience.