Jost Münster, "The Home of the Former Storyteller" (2008). Oil on canvas, 83½ x 56½ in.

February 2009 Reviews

Tetsumi Kudo

Giorgio Morandi

Italics

White Columns Annual

Ari Marcopoulos

Lisa Sanditz

Omer Fast

Sarah Lucas

Charline Von Heyl

Hannah Villiger

Vik Muniz

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If geometric abstraction makes you think of cool and humorless stillness, six paintings by this London-based German artist will invite you to reconsider. Known for displaying small paintings on wooden shelves and painting directly onto cardboard plinths and objects — a variable emphasis on the medium’s sculptural potential — here Jost Münster embeds three-dimensionality in his paintings’ narrative. Several have layers of triangles, rectangles, and rhomboids built into what appears to be a freestanding object on a thin strip of ground. In The Home of the Former Storyteller (all works 2008), a climbing frame of colored triangles stands on two points on a band of gray skirting the bottom of the canvas. Münster creates a shifting grid, using "shadows" thrown from the sharp lines interconnecting the forms like plywood piping. On the top pictorial layer rest five rectangular, gray white screens, like whitewashed windows hiding construction work. This elegant balancing of the planes of vision makes the space in front of and behind the canvas seem to fold in and out simultaneously. Solidity also gives way to emptiness in Mademoiselle K, which resembles a three-paneled vertical screen, composed of windows and blocks of muted color. This is more of a facade than a building, a proposal for some future form. And it’s this sense of optimism, willpower, and direction that planning demands that captures the mood of this show. The work is playful, but you know Münster hasn’t taken his mind off modernism for a minute: how to answer it, intervene in its cherished rhetoric, and exceed it. "Jost Münster" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.