23 NOV until 1 FEB 2025

The gallery will exhibit new paintings by Ulrich Erben from 23 November 2024 to 1 February 2025. The artist, who lives and works in Düsseldorf, is one of the most important pioneers of abstract painting in Europe.

His early works, characterised by his exploration of landscapes of the Lower Rhine and in Italy, lead to an exploration of the relationships and interactions between colour, light, tone and harmony. In Erben’s work, landscape becomes a ›vessel of memory‹. The perceptibility of space can be seen as another central theme in the artist’s work. Erben opens up monochrome colour spaces, some of which are reduced to the absolute neutrality of white.

Ulrich Erben’s later cycles of work, such as »Siria« and »Colours of Memory« are characterised by his perceptions during his travels to the South and the phenomena of light. The remembered effect of light appears as an echo in the striking reductions of his paintings.

In recent years he has created works in which horizontal and vertical line structures define the pictorial planes. Colour fields originating from geometrical compositions become connections and separations of colour interactions.

»Shadow in Light« is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. In 2019, his work was presented retrospectively in a comprehensive solo exhibition at the »Josef Albers Museum Quadrat« in Bottrop. In recent years, Ulrich Erben’s work has been exhibited at the Langen Foundation Neuss, the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, the Kunstmuseum Bayreuth and the Villa Brandolini in Pieve di Soglio (Veneto).

8 FEB until 26 APR 2025

Cy Twombly began photographing in 1951, initially in black and white, as a student at the famous ›Black Mountain College‹, which he attended together with Robert Rauschenberg. It is a form of art, which he never gave up. However, it was not until several decades later that Twombly’s photographs found recognition in public exhibitions and publications.

Since 1972, Twombly used a Polaroid camera SX-70. High-quality prints were produced in a renowned Atelier Fresson in Savigny-sur-Orge near Paris, enlarged in small editions on soft, matt paper.

Today, we regard the photographs as a new form of sensuality of the observed world. The topoi of the photographs touch on everyday events, the reflections of changing seasons throughout the year, motifs from Twombly’s homes in Gaeta by the sea in southern Italy and Lexington, Virginia, images from the painter’s studio, details of paintings, and fragments of sculptures.

What all these still photographs touch upon is the poeticized nature and its intrinsicality as a parable and metamorphosis. In some of these forms, which magically transform an object in a close-up as they ›draw‹ the distilled light on it, we are met with the feeling that reading and the insight of a Haiku evokes in us. The floral motifs and the blooms are entangled in cyphers of summer, images, and moments reminiscing of poet’s garden described by Marcel Proust.

»All is visible and all elusive« is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at Bastian Gallery. Cy Twombly’s photographs can be found in numerous important private and institutional collections and have been shown in recent years in solo exhibitions at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura, the Sursock Museum, Beirut, the Château La Coste in Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade and the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech