The show intends to inspire a dialogue between the two artists, belonging to two generations of (female) abstract painters. Jule Korneffel moved to NY to be surrounded by the art world of artists like De Kooning, Twombly and Warhol, and especially Mary Heilmann and Agnes Martin, and to experience living in NY and traveling through the vast landscapes of North America. She received an M.F.A. from Hunter College, and after her graduation in 2018 quickly gained attention in the US for her emotional but utmost reductive paintings. Recent shows include Phase Patterns at ltd los angeles and her NY solo debut at Spencer Brownstone. Mini Me Mary is her first presentation in the Netherlands. Korneffel mostly paints on canvas, sometimes onto the wall. While her practice follows an abstract style of inscriptive mark making she follows a minimalist sensibility. By allowing underpainting to be visible the paintings reveal a process of reduction.
The layering in each painting appears as a filtering of experiences. The picture plane is a lived experience in which she is able to arrive at a precision of forms and colors by what she calls floating through its creation. In her painterly practice Jule Korneffel explicitly relates to Mary Heilmann, a representative for Geometric Abstraction since the 1970s, who is known for challenging the rigorous codes of Minimalism by adding personal references to her geometric and simple painterly compositions.
Both Korneffel and Heilmann imbue personal every day life experience into abstract language. Jule Korneffel identifies with what she calls “Heilmann’s real life quality,“ meaning to embody a sensational quality of space and time in painting. Like the work of Heilmann the work of Korneffel invites the viewer to a conversation. It takes time to engage with the work, to sense what is happening in the experiential living space. Even though reduced to an extreme, both their compositions provide an open-endedness. The makers as well as the viewers complete them through their individual experience. — Painting becomes a living space.
