WHITE STREET. CARO JOST

Opening: 24 June 2016

In her art, Caro Jost deals with questions of how time, places and events can be captured and preserved in all their complexity. In 2000, she developed her “Streetprints” in New York, a specific method for making invisible traces of the past visible again, depicting them authentically and placing them in a current, contemporary context. - “Streetprints” are imprints of street and pavement reliefs on canvas. The environment itself is both the subject and actual print template. The traces that people have left in the asphalt over the decades with each of their footsteps or passages are recorded and blend together in the print, with time and place flowing together to form a single entity.

In 2010, Caro Jost began to look for traces of the Abstract Expressionists in New York. She researched and visited their former studios, noting and filming what is still visible today of these places where art history was written.

The current exhibition WHITE STREET is centred around Jost’s research on Barnett Newman’s former studio on White Street in New York. The artist projects a sequence about Barnett Newman from “Final Traces of the Abstract Expressionists” onto a large wall-collage of photos and streetprints of White Street - a filmic juxtaposition of what remains visible today of the artist’s former studio.

Finally, the exhibition is rounded out with a barely known use of colour in Caro Jost’s work: “Streetprints” that have been partially painted over with austere grids reminiscent of Manhattan’s street network - like a homage to Piet Mondrian and “Broadway Boogie Woogie”, his last work from 1943, shortly before his death in New York.

We look forward to welcoming you soon. Ralf Haensel