Jochen Flinzer, Charlotte Malcolm-Smith, Herbert Warmuth
In the early 1980s, Jochen Flinzer discovered that the backs of embroidery works, which arise purely by chance and often go unnoticed, possess their own abstract qualities.
He began to embroider in order to create such non-representational embroidered drawings. Since then, he has been captivated by this way of drawing with a needle, following line and thread.
His early embroidered images are mostly based on templates from his immediate surroundings. “I use things that intrigue me, that excite me, that I encounter daily,” Flinzer explains. Intuitively, he selects postcards, tattoos, personal ads, or lottery tickets, which he embroiders directly and according to various conceptual approaches. [...] The emotionally charged content of the front appears on the back as a depersonalized abstract geometric lineament with static significance. [...] He synthesizes abstraction and realism, which Kandinsky defined as the two poles of painting, within the same work.
(Excerpts from a text by Nicole Fritz 2004)
Charlotte Malcolm-Smith works with an awareness of a long painting tradition, within which she addresses the challenges of this medium. The themes she explores in her series of images serve as a starting point to go beyond the respective idea and investigate the possibilities of the medium itself. [...] During a working phase, very different technical solutions can be developed based on the individual requirements of each subject.
The [...] multifaceted content and often citational level primarily serves the painterly inherent question of how a painting can “function.” [...] Among the range of possible techniques, the processing of synthetic wool stands on equal footing with conventional, classical methods. [...] The mundane character of the material is deliberately ignored here and equated as an equivalent element of painting on the canvas. [...] The exploratory aspect of all content and formal levels is what makes Charlotte Malcolm-Smith's work truly risky, as her approach does not follow a voluntaristic method but instead poses formal questions arising from contentually interesting themes with maximum openness.
(Excerpts from a text by Regina Schultz-Möller 2009)
Herbert Warmuth is part of a tradition of painting research. He is neither purely abstract nor purely figurative; he is a deceiver of the eye, but also a color field painter. In his investigation of painting materials, color, substrates, and canvases, he continually brings forth very distinctive images. [...] “A fold, no fold,” titled Sandra Danicke in the Frankfurter Rundschau in a review of Herbert Warmuth's works in March 2005. She captured the essence of a problem that Warmuth has always grappled with: What is real and what is illusion? Where do the boundaries lie between painting, relief, and sculpture, and how can these genres be expanded or connected? [...] The multipart, sometimes irregularly shaped surfaces are not only covered with canvas but also with used textiles, including dress shirts and awning fabric, and are predominantly painted flat with oil, acrylic, and colored pencils, though sometimes also in a more impasto manner. [...] Herbert Warmuth brings together two worlds: that of painterly illusionism and the real world, to which we and other things belong. In this interplay, belief and skepticism intertwine.
(Excerpts from a text by Markus Lepper 2008)