Study of Painting as a contemporary medium of artistic expression at the Department of Painting with Prof. Susanne Kühn
Painting is not only a marking on a image. Painting is not only the medium of color, its form and its complex history. Painting is above all an open artistic process that can make our time visible.
In a picture it can be seen, which contents are put to the disposition; into which artistic languages and signs the picture markings are translated; whether and how the painting links itself in its social environment, which emotions have influence and how color as visual impression of the light becomes the expression of the complex thinking process and the perception.
Only through the temporal sequence of painterly markings do these core points form a process. Each of these markings is dependent on the creative and reflexive thinking and the subjective as well as collective attitude of the artists, formed in the confrontation with their environment, its manifestations and its materials.
What is the concrete significance of this complex process for the creation of a picture? What is a picture? How, for example, can one still paint cityscapes, color fields, or ornaments today, when countless artistic forms of expression in the history of painting have already worked on these subjects? What possibilities are realized in the painting of a human being that make the picture a specific work?
In the Kühn class we would like to release the students' abilities to get to know and consciously use this exciting, highly open process of painting.
Through the joint analysis of the process of creation of the students' works, through the exploration of their own formal, media-specific or overarching and content-related interests and preferences, through the learning of and experimentation with painterly techniques and modes of expression and through the further development of the concept of 'painting' in the dimensions of today's real and virtual world, a platform is to be created in the class in which not only the finished picture is an expression of painterly creation, but above all also the discussion that ignites around this work.
During our class discussions, the students' works are regularly shown in simulated exhibition situations in our rooms and discussed, taking into account artistic strategies, art historical and contemporary positions, as well as autobiographical and discursive texts. Small group discussions, which can also take place in digital formats, serve to specifically analyze the works and provide important impulses for their further development.
Exhibition projects, invited artists, workshops and study trips provide the students with a basis for reflecting on the self-dramatization of their own work and finding their own or collective position between presence, intellectual concept and painterly attitude.
