Ernst Caramelle

Wall painting transforms Wex lobby

Ernst Caramelle
Untitled, 2012
Site-specific watercolor wall painting at the Wexner Center for the Arts
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: M. Christopher Jones

Columbus, OH—Austrian artist Ernst Caramelle has covered the Wexner Center’s lower lobby area with a site-specific wall painting, on view January 28–July 1, 2012. The artist is best known for his large-scale wall paintings (done by hand), composed of simple geometric forms rendered in delicate hues that produce complex, unexpected results in the architectural spaces they occupy. Over the past four decades, Caramelle has used various means—ranging from the modest to the monumental—to explore questions of perception and phenomenology.

The Wexner Center’s installation is visible, with varying perceptual effects, as visitors move through the upper and lower lobbies.

Notes Wexner Center Chief Curator Christopher Bedford, “Ernst Caramelle is keenly aware of both art history and theory, interests that are evident in his use of wall paintings, the most traditional of media, and in his career-long engagement with the modernist dialectic of flatness vs. illusion. In his architecturally scaled paintings, he uses starkly flat sections of color to create powerfully illusionistic spaces that appear to extend the existing structure, making viewers differently aware of environments they thought they knew.”

Bedford adds, “The Wexner Center’s soaring, eccentric geometries will be fertile ground for Caramelle’s continued engagement with these questions.”

Caramelle considers documentation and didactic materials part of his work, demonstrating his ongoing awareness of the relationships among past and present installations. Accordingly, a brochure will be produced for this installation, which will feature Caramelle’s sketches for the Wexner Center installation, as well as an essay by Bedford.

About the artist

Ernst Caramelle, a Wexner Center residency artist for 2011‒12, has worked and exhibited in a variety of media, including video, collage, and large-scale installations, since the 1970s. He attracted a new level of acclaim and critical appreciation with the site-specific installation he created for Art Basel in 2011. Born in 1952 in Tirol, Austria, he attended the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and was a research fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies in Cambridge, MA. Since 1994 he has been teaching at the Karlsruhe Art Academy in Karlsruhe, Germany. He lives and works in Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, and New York. Caramelle has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Nächst St. Stephan-Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich (2011); Comma 26, Bloomberg Space, London (2010); Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris (2009); Tracy Williams, Ltd., New York, and Mary Mary, Glasgow (2008); Museu Fundação Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2005); Lawrence Markey, New York (2004); and Portikus, Frankfurt, and Wiener Secession, Vienna (1993). He has also been featured in group exhibitions at the South London Gallery (2010); Sammlung Generali Foundation, Vienna (2005); Documenta IX, Kassel (1992); and Musée d’Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1990).

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Wednesday, May 23rd

• FILM/VIDEO
  • THE BOX
    Karrabing! Low Tide Turning
• EXHIBITIONS
  • Ernst Caramelle
  • Omer Fast: 2001/11
  • Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955‒1972
• PUBLIC PROGRAMS
  • Pages Exhibition
  • An Evening with Carrie Fisher