Constructed Identities

APT artist Jens Wolf (b. 1967 in Heilbronn, lives and works in Berlin, Germany) always makes a first draft of his paintings on small-size plywood tablets, he calls Pattern Boards. He considers those as original art works, but they are also used as an image reference collection useful in the process of developing new paintings, similar in shapes but different in scale.

Moreover, the Pattern Boards are a constantly expanding inventory of visual suggestion, which represent all the geometrical possibilities of the artist. Strict lines and plain coloured surfaces are handled as permeable and open objects, where cuts from the board edges, interrupted lines and the raw surface of the plywood subverts the common notions of constructive painting.

The exhibition shows a selection of Pattern Boards together with some bigger paintings, so to introduce the viewer into the complex body of works of the international artist. On one hand, we can see how Jens Wolf, inside the possibilities given by a single pattern, quotes himself many times, occasionally repeating the same motives. On the other hand, every painting comes out new and empowered from his bigger scale, although all the detail of the smaller version corresponds. Thereby the strong geometrical entities of the Pattern Boards and their clones arise ultimately as a completely new image to be experienced with an independent identity and expression.