Known for his delicate, minimal interventions in the gallery space using a simple set of materials, artist David Ostrowski has long mined a simple, yet nuanced approach to gesture and mark-making.  For his first-ever exhibition with Sprüth Magers in London, however, Ostrowski has embraced a new sense of materiality and density in his work, assembling a series of textural, multi-layered arrangements in canvas and paper that emphasize his impressive structural sensibilities and his deep understanding of the act of painterly construction.

David Ostrowski, The Thin Red Line (Installation view), courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photography: Voytek Ketz, London & postproduction by Hans-Georg Gaul, Berlin

The works on view in this series began earlier this year as part of a new phase in Ostrowski’s practice.  Revisiting the color red, which had previously appeared in his works almost a decade ago and rarely appeared in his oeuvre, he delves in particular into the cultural relativity of the color as an initial point of interest.  Red can connote love or lust, in some contexts, while elsewhere it brings up impressions of danger, caution, or in other cultures, good luck and longevity.  The state of these works, soaked in red paint or accented with similar shades, is deliberately unspecified, and equally stand in a state if noncommittal application.  While Ostrowski focuses deeply on the color, he equally allows it to spatter and spill across his canvases, leaving it to converse with added collage layers, empty spaces and even multiple depths and dimensions at once.  In one corner, a canvas is hung in the middle of the room, countering its surface with a dense red piece nearby, and creating flows of attention and narrative between each element.

David Ostrowski, The Thin Red Line (Installation view), courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photography: Voytek Ketz, London & postproduction by Hans-Georg Gaul, Berlin

The works are equally mechanical in their pursuit of a distinct fusion between cultural iconographies and a rote industrial application of paint.  One piece, F (Component), features part of the name of a German paint brand, Alpinaweiß, painted in red acrylic on a pale background, whilst F (Freischwinger) is a digital pigment print of antique chairs superimposed on a red backdrop. In each, the idea of assemblage, of production as mechanical versus human, always sits at the heart of the work. Paintings with large areas of paintwork signal Ostrowski’s idiosyncratic painting style – working quickly and spontaneously with fast-drying materials, adding texture and depth through his collaged elements, as if working from a state of automatic writing that produces his works in the same manner that the industrial signifiers he loops into each work represent ready-made materiality and an abstraction of production by the human hand.

David Ostrowski, The Thin Red Line (Installation view), courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photography: Voytek Ketz, London & postproduction by Hans-Georg Gaul, Berlin

At the same time, Ostrowski’s interest in the unspecified leaves these same narrative far from resolved, and his work seems to always question the viewer’s assumptions.  Perhaps this line of pursuit stands as his most concise argument then, that even in the face of a distinctly mechanized, procedural work, the human presence within each work feels both present and notably hard to pin down.

The show closes February 9th.

David Ostrowski, The Thin Red Line (Installation view), courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photography: Voytek Ketz, London & postproduction by Hans-Georg Gaul, Berlin

David Ostrowski, The Thin Red Line (Installation view), courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photography: Voytek Ketz, London & postproduction by Hans-Georg Gaul, Berlin

— D. Creahan

Read more:
David Ostrowski: The Thin Red Line [Exhibition Site]