Anne Neukamp: Impossible Object

With Anne Neukamp: Impossible Object, the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum is showing works by the painter Anne Neukamp (b. 1976 in Düsseldorf, lives and works in Berlin) for the first time in a comprehensive institutional solo exhibition. This was realized in close collaboration with the artist and presents primarily recent works created since 2019, as well as key works from the period before.

In addition to paintings on canvas, a series of works on paper will be on view, which as large formats represent a new aspect in the artist’s oeuvre. Some of the works were created especially for the exhibition in Düren and conceived for the space in the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum. It is serial elements that characterize Anne Neukamp’s works. They seem to consist of simple analogies to components of digital and analog everyday life: Pictorial signs, language abbreviations, shaped pieces. And yet they do not belong to a uniform visual conception of reality, but stem from different agreements on how reality is to be represented. They irritate both in their hermetic isolation and in the constellations in which they appear in the picture. They enter into an interaction with the pictorial space or the color surfaces defining it, which, however, cannot be conclusively resolved upon close examination. On the contrary, they help visual paradoxes to take effect and, with painterly means, take account of the potential of digital image worlds. They thus show numerous references to the art history of Western modernism, while at the same time following their own pictorial conception and activating the possibilities of analog painting beyond logical pictorial construction.

A catalog book with a text by Martin Herbert will be published by Strzelecki Books to accompany the exhibition.
The publication is generously supported by the Kultur- und Naturstiftung der Sparkasse Düren, the Josef Zilcken Kunst- und Kulturförderungs gGmbH and the Museumsverein Düren e.V.