Anette Ziss at Werner Klein
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Gerard McCarthy
The 10 recent medium-size paintings by Anette Ziss in this exhibition featured serial imagery with thin, intricate lines of one color set against monochrome backgrounds of contrasting hue. Nine of the acrylic-on-canvas works here, all untitled, are part of a series that the Gottingen-born artist based on Monet's iconic images of Rouen Cathedral. The tenth painting is part of another series based on a work by Jakob Philipp Hackert, an 18th-century German artist known for idealized landscapes.
In the initial stage of her painting process, Ziss places clear Mylar atop reproductions of her source images. She traces over the areas where there are prominent shifts of light and color. By means of these assured yet quivering lines, she transposes the painterly flourishes of the original paintings into crisp, staccato markings. With the help of an overhead projector, she paints the lines onto canvases that are the same sizes as the source paintings (about 42 by 29 inches). The distinctive colors she chooses correspond directly to color combinations found in Monet's exploration of the play of sunlight on the cathedral's west facade at various times of day. Dark brown umber on bright yellow is featured in one Ziss painting, and purple-inflected blue set against pale green in another. Maroon on slate-blue and crimson on beige are emphasized in two of the show's most striking pieces.
In the Monet series, Ziss achieves the sense of a trembling, liquid architecture, as the uniformly thin, densely packed lines form a kind of hypnotic veil over the colorful grounds. However, despite the intense linear activity of acute turns and soft bends, the vertical structure of the cathedral is never totally obscured. Clusters of lines indicating the circular shapes of the portal arch and the rose window prove that Ziss, while putting Monet's serial imagery through the filter of her own reductivist approach, leaves nothing out of the mix, neither architectural elements nor the Impressionist's soft glowing light.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
Top of Page