Carl Ostendarp: Greatest Hits Exhibition Catalogue Kunstverein Heilbronn

In 2014, Ken Johnson writes in the New York Times about Carl Ostendarp’s works that they had the same effect as someone belching in church during worship. This admiring observation is aimed at the artist’s oxymoronic skill of combining the ­incompatible: onomatopoeia from comics (in the NYT it is called "goofy signature letters") with cool color-field or hard-edge painting (accord­ing to NYT: "high-minded seriousness of the modernist monochrome"). The background for Carl Ostendarp’s quite entertaining paintings is his interest in graph­ics, which he shares with many artists of his ­generation. Born in 1961 in the liberal university town of Amherst, Massachusetts, he now lives and works as an art professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 2017 Carl Ostendarp presented his first comprehensive solo-exhibition at Kunstverein Heilbronn in Germany, after cabinet exhibitions at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and MMK in Frankfurt am Main. For his solo shows, he usually creates extensive wallpaintings reminiscent of landscapes. For his solo shows, he usually creates extensive wallpaintings reminiscent of landscapes on which he positions works on paper and canvas.

Matthia Löbke, born 1963, artistic director of the Kunstverein Heilbronn, is curator and publishes monographic catalogs about Yoshitaka Amano, Markus Lüpertz, Olaf Metzel, Enoc Perez, Michael Schmidt, Michael Venezia, and Silke Wagner. In Cologne she was an assistant to Donald Judd and gained her doctorate on Dan Flavin. Lane Relyea is Associate Professor and Chair of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University and the Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal. His essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, Art in America, and Flash Art.