Ossi Fink

Die Vermählung von Himmel und Erde, 2007

Ossi Fink’s 24 picture objects honoring modernism’s iconic pictorial shapes can be situated somewhere between an ideological utopian manifesto and a romantic requiem. Three pieces of fabric in different shades of red and brown tones are applied to square stretcher frames, all of the same size. Each of them features across shape broken off at the bottom, in a slightly different color tone. A third fabric or color borders the pictures at the sides. The superficial inspiration for this series came from the almost daily strolls the artist took through Munich’s fabric retail outlets for over a year—his palette comes from the huge range of textiles on sale, changing with the seasons. The spectrum ranges from a fine-spun mustard tone to diverse red tones to a dark brown with a granulated structure. As with Josef Albers’s epoch-making series of pictures Homage to the Square, which contain three or four nested squares in similar color tones that create a ‘fundamental harmony’ of color, a viewer of Ossi Fink’s Vermählung [Marriage] experiences an ‘orchestrated red’ produced by combining 24 ‘instruments’, or pictorial bodies.