Rune Mields: Der unendliche Raum—dehnt sich aus

With Der unendliche Raum—dehnt sich aus (The Infinite Space—Expands), Ludwig Forum is presenting the work of the Cologne-based artist Rune Mields (b. 1935 in Münster), who lived in Aachen from 1965 to 1970. Not only was she a central figure in the legendary Kunstverein Gegenverkehr: Zentrum für aktuelle Kunst e.V. (a membership-based art club), but during that time she also produced in her Aachen studio a group of works called the “Röhrenbilder” (Pipe Paintings): large-format paintings based on drawings of cylinders, cones, and planes rendered fully sculpturally, on which she worked for several years from 1968 onward, and of which Peter and Irene Ludwig purchased Nr. 26 (1969) for their collection in 1970. In interplay with a selection of her paintings of prime numbers and tangents from the following years, the exhibition presents an artist who began in Aachen to create “infinite spaces” by operating with systems, theories, and phenomena from mathematics, geometry, physics, philosophy, and other sciences. Mields’s creative work has been guided ever since by her interest in lending a physical presence to systems and structures of both mathematical and political nature. She studies and illustrates these often-hidden concepts of order and translates them into the form of painting.

Her “Röhrenbilder” not only represent the point of departure and center of the exhibition but also manifest the beginning of a grappling with describing space by means of painting that would continue for many years. In the first step, the artist creates precisely worked-out preliminary drawings to try out new combinations of and variations on her basic theme before translating the motifs into large-format paintings. Inspired by industrial photographs of rocket stages, oil tanks, control devices, and other technical equipment and machines illustrated in newspapers, geometric forms on planar surfaces determine the canvas in question. Painted in the perfect illusionistic manner, isolated pipes or cones protrude from the monochrome backgrounds, splitting them up, looming out of them, aiming directly at the viewers in order to integrate them into the action of the space surrounding them.

Rune Mields is interested in the pipe as a symbol of energy, technology, aggression, and rationalist, as a geometric form as well as an instrument for describing space. Over the course of her experiments, she increasingly found the fetish character of the objects depicted to be distracting and in the “Tangenten” (Tangents) series reduced the elements creating form and space to simple lines. As the art historian Annelie Pohlen has written in 1979, by increasingly abstracting the objects from the illusion of plastic, spatial reality, the “Tangenten” resulted from the “Röhrenbilder”: “The technoid symbol directly and aggressively aimed at the viewer yields to the iridescent language of abstract systems. But just as the pipes point equally to ruling over the cosmos and being ruled by the cosmos, the dialectic of order and chaos also lies hidden in all of the systems that people have derived from experienceable reality.”

In 1976, Rune Mields directed her focus on numeral systems and began to work intensely with Chinese-Japanese sanju prime numbers in particular. She wrote in ink on scrolls using stroke or bamboo numerals all the sanju prime numbers from 0 to 120,000 which grow denser on the paper as their numerical value increases. In the children’s book 10 Finger und die Zahlen 1 bis 10 (10 Fingers and the Numbers 1 to 10), presented in the exhibition along with the prime numbers, Mields superimposes numeral systems on the figures of a splayed hand, alluding to her interest in the numeral systems of various cultural spheres and to a human desire to establish ordering systems that can be observed globally. “Everything has forms because they are inherent in numbers; take the latter from them, and they are nothing,” writes the artist in one of her works, citing the Late Antique doctor of the church Augustine. Mields’s works are borne by the ambivalences of humanity: the search for scientific ordering structures and the simultaneous desire for spirituality and irrationality; the closeness or reason and magic. They also illustrate orders in order to subsequently question and destabilize them.

Supplemented by ninety-two drawings that could recently be acquired with support from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation, additional study drawings, ephemera, and a gallery presentation on “Gegenverkehr”, the exhibition at Ludwig Forum on the occasion of her imminent ninetieth birthday offers extensive insights into her fields of study and interest. In the process, it makes it possible to follow one by one the individual steps in the research process of this remarkable pioneer of painting in the information age. Its title, Der unendliche Raum—dehnt sich aus, goes back to a conversation between the artist and her brother had about space and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. In response to the question whether the statement is scientifically correct, she responded, “If you want to express it poetically, that’s not a problem.” Rune Mields then had a white sign with that text made and installed it on a pedestrian in Monschau in 1971 as part of the exhibition Die Expansion der Kunst (The Expansion of Art) (1970). The sentence has been the conceptual breeding ground for her work ever since.

Curated by Eva Birkenstock with assistance from Anna Marckwald and Mailin Haberland. Accompanied by a gallery exhibition curated by Holger Otten, Anna Marckwald, and Miriam Schmidt on the Kunstverein Gegenverkehr: Zentrum für aktuelle Kunst e.V., of which Rune Mields was a cofounder.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication on the “Röhrenbilder” designed by Studio Thomas Spallek with a new essay by Annelie Pohlen.