By Barry Schwabsky
June 2024
Installation view of Anna Kunz: Paintings to the Full Flower Moon (May 15-June 26, 2024) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.
Broadly speaking, abstract art has always shuttled between the poles of structure and action. Not that the two terms are incompatible, but the accent has always been on one or the other. Practices that attach almost exclusively to one pole or the other—for instance, Ad Reinhardt’s “exclusive, negative, absolute, and timeless” (as well as endlessly reiterable) black squares on the one hand, Niki de Saint Phalle’s gunshots at bags of paint on the other—are rare, but so are those in which the contrary impulses perfectly balance each other. But that’s what happens in Anna Kunz’s work. Speaking to me recently, Kunz emphasized that she had studied performance and printmaking, not painting. Her point was to emphasize that she feels she approaches the act of painting differently from most other painters, and that she has had to invent her own way into it. I’m more interested in what I see as a dichotomy between the two very different arts of printmaking and performance—and my sense that they map rather well onto my dichotomy between structure and action. In painting, Kunz has claimed the space in between—between vitalism and order, spectacle and restraint. Her paintings create an architecture of color, raising porous walls and opening portals of solid light.
Installation view of Anna Kunz: Paintings to the Full Flower Moon (May 15-June 26, 2024) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.
It’s true that Kunz doesn’t paint the way most painters do. For instance: brushes aren’t her thing. She prefers tools from the hardware rather than the art supply store—for instance, rollers. Now that’s a minority choice among painters, but not unique; the real difference is this: Most painters who avail themselves of rollers use them, I think, as tools for deskilling, that is, a certain surrender of mastery; or else they want to assimilate their art of painting to the craft of a housepainter. In either case, they would not say what Kunz said to me recently, that she finds in the roller a “kinesthetic empathy” (beautiful phrase!—I’ve got to borrow it for a title) that allows her to play her color with the fine control a musician exercises in sounding an extended tone: “It’s sort of like playing a cello.” And so it is: This artist draws out tones both broad and deep but always varied. Quite the opposite of deskilled, her facture is just as far from flashy. She uses her sometimes homemade painting implements to cultivate a “continuous movement” that, she says, “helps me to sort of sublimate any personal or calligraphic mark making, like I would be doing with a brush. This gives me sort of a boundary and constraint so I can visually choreograph the color.” Take note: Rather than avoiding calligraphy, she sublimates it.
Color is more things in Kunz’s work than in most paintings. It is not “pure.” It is light and shadow, but also texture and weight, matter and air, body and soul. I think of a line from Stéphane Mallarmé’s enigmatic text Un coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice): “Rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu”—nothing will have taken place but the place. I think that for Kunz, painting is this place which is the site of nothing but itself and therefore the site of, potentially, anything and everything else. And it is a place, not for the past or even the present tense, but of the future perfect, for what will have been—a time that is, so to speak, in between the present and a specific future, or between the prospective and the retroactive.
Anna Kunz
Moonflower’s Errand, 2024
acrylic on canvas
72 x 78 in. (182.9 x 198.1 cm.)
That stretch of time turns out to be an amenable surrounding, full of folds and compartments, intervals and overlaps, things gathered and loosened, atmospheres condensing and solids melting away, a space permeable to weather yet welcomingly enclosed, always evoking distinct times of day. Proportion and asymmetry embrace, dynamism and balance exchange roles. This delicate state of internally motile equilibrium is underpinned by the very format of the paintings, which approach the equilaterality of the square without attaining it: With few exceptions, her paintings usually deviate from the square (with its neutrality, antinaturalism, and impassivity) by six inches either horizontally or vertically—we experience them as either rectangles aspiring to the condition of squareness or squares aspiring to rectangularity or, more likely, both at once. One senses a slow but powerful ongoing modulation from one state to another, a perpetual and self-sustaining oscillation. It’s a movement the viewer can enter into easily. The forms, with their interlocking of curvilinear and rectilinear aspects, construct stepwise yet fluid paths for the eye to follow around rectangles whose dimensions, ranging between 60 and 78 inches, are keyed to the body: supple spaces the gaze can fit into snugly but that don’t close it in, where what will have taken place is happening right now.
Anna Kunz
First Crocus, 2024
acrylic on canvas
66 x 60 in. (167.6 x 152.4 cm.)
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg Press, 2019) and The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016) as well as two collections of poetry, Water from Another Source (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) and Feelings of And (Black Square Editions, 2022).
This essay appears in the exhibition catalogue Anna Kunz: Paintings to the Full Flower Moon.
Installation view of Anna Kunz: Paintings to the Full Flower Moon (May 15-June 26, 2024) at Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photos: Dario Lasagni
