2 February to 17 April 1996
Peter Tollens – A Picture and Books
Cabinet Exhibition in the window
»Several sheets make a book«. This statement in the Brothers Grimm’s dictionary is especially relevant to 41 books by Peter Tollens created since 1984. Other than this description, the exercise books, notebooks and books do not have much in common. They are adhesive-bound, thread-stitched, spiral bound, lumped together, or already bound sheets of the most diverse kinds of paper. Exercise books may be among them as well as extensive works consisting of many layers. Their formats vary from extremely minute handwriting – called by artists “little breviary” – to folios. They contain sequences of brush and pen drawings, woodcuts and monotypes which can be opened and seen in changing order. Peter Tollens is one of the younger generation of painters for whom the correlation of colourfulness, colour and the application of paint has become essential. The corporeality of his paintings makes memories possible for the viewer with the utmost precision. As objects of tactile viewing they represent a reality which is more and more in danger of being lost in our virtual age. Paintings and books are closely connected: Just as the painting invites a contemplation which examines the process of its creation and its transformation in the light, neither does the drawing, as a series in the books, find an ultimate form. Each sheet is as a completed design, the result of a confrontation with nature or with art as a second reality which the next sheet already demands. (In the series of booklets “…in the Window” a “Book of Art” has been published containing 32 monotypes in a numbered edition of 500, after the original from 1996).
(Artist Book)