Markus Amm

Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Since the late 1990s, Markus Amm (b. 1969, Stuttgart, Germany) has been methodically and sensitively exploring how the materials of painting, reduced to their essences, cohere into abstract images. His work can be luminous and illusionistic or bracingly sculptural and physical, and in many cases, it is both of these things simultaneously. Amm is also interested in how the perception of time informs the processes of making art and looking at it, as the processes he uses to produce many of his works require long periods of waiting and looking. The paintings, therefore, pose questions about how we distinguish between action and reflection. “[The] very time of not actively painting, during which you only observe the picture, is the most important part of the process,” Amm has remarked. “It is the moment in which [the artist is] most engaged with it.”

Markus Amm has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel, Switzerland (2017) and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany (2010). His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Spring, Fondation Thalie, Brussels (2021); Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting Today, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014); Die Geometrie der Dinge, GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, Germany (2013); Only here: The Federal Republic of Germany’s Contemporary Art Collection Acquisitions from 2007 to 2011, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2013); Neuer Konstruktivismus, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Museum Waldhof, Germany (2007); and Formalismus, Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany (2004). Amm lives and works in Geneva.