Ull Hohn’s debut exhibition in Italy opens with Untitled (Nine Landscapes), 1988: nine wooden boxes painted with bucolic scenes in yellow. Hohn applied the paint using brushes and palette knives, in the manner of Gerhard Richter, who was Hohn’s teacher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. Hohn went on to participate in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York in the second half of the 1980s and showed this work for a related exhibition in 1988. It must have been one of the only paintings on view, given the fervor for institutional critique in those days.
Throughout the show, a dialogue about painting unfolds, elucidating the artist’s extraordinary formal and theoretical research, which he carried out for about a decade until his death at the age of thirty-five in Berlin. Hohn’s investigation of painting pushed the medium’s boundaries as he experimented in different pictorial registers, cyclically forcing himself to forget his educational background. In this sense, Joy of Painting, 1993, is astounding; it consists of pieces made by following instructions from Bob Ross. The show is interspersed with four incarnations of Tom Burr’s Particular Room Divider, 2015, a work made with plywood structures, Plexiglas mirrors, paintings, and metal supports. Hohn and Burr had a profound relationship and once shared a studio together. Burr solemnly notes in an accompanying press release that the work departs from his memory of the thin wall that separated his studio from Hohn’s.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
